Chat During Presentations - Question for Audience and Presenters

Most presentations over the past four days of Life 2.0 Summit have been delivered via audio (i.e., teleconference to ShoutCast, hence back to attendees via the theatre parcel's Music URL). This leaves audience members free -- effectively in a separate "channel" from the speaker -- to discuss and feed back via Chat. And a colleague of ours has raised the question whether this should be encouraged.

I'd like to hear what people think. From the point of view of a presenter, it offers a quandary. It's nice, on the one hand, to hear audience feedback -- helps keep a talk anchored in audience interests, and enables the presenter to address specific concerns. But it can be distracting, and occasionally unnerving to constantly be aware of a stream of communications (to which, as a presenter, you can't easily contribute, because you're busy presenting) about what you're saying.

I'd love to hear from presenters and attendees about this. To some extent, it's a moot point -- we can't suppress chat or IM, even if we wanted to (which we don't). I'm just wondering how it makes people feel. And beyond that, I'm wondering if we're actually seeing a sort of technologically-mediated cultural change in our idea of what constitutes appropriate conduct in public spaces.

The comparison has been drawn to RL events, where attendees IM and network via WiFi. This is different, I think. The presenter isn't aware of those communications, and is generally incapable of taking part, so it doesn't become, on the one hand, such a public issue, and on the other, such a matter of concern for "etiquette." In SL, if one wished to create a parallel system, people could (in principle) use the Life 2.0 group to quietly comment to one another during presos. But some of our attendees may not have joined that group, or even be aware of it -- so it excludes some parties. Conversely, having constant group messages coming across your screen while listening to a presentation can be annoying, and aside from resigning from a group, there's no way to filter that in SL (that I'm aware of -- if there is, I wish someone would tell me).

So is this cultural change we're seeing? If so, it's not without precedent -- back in Elizabethan times, it was common to attend theatre and (while performances were in progress) participate in a complex exchange of comments, heckling, eating of meals, and other social activity, some irrelevant to the performance. And this is true in other cultures as well, as anyone who's attended long performances of Chinese opera can tell you.

Feedback?
I like audio because it makes it easy on new residents, makes it easy to film presentations integrally, and because some presenters are quite comfortable with it. Audio troubles me because of lag, occasional technical problems, and because of the difficult burden it places on presenters to function in two 'modes' at once: to speak to the audience (at some remove of seconds in time, because of lag), and to interpret their feedback (normally given via (typed) chat).

Posted by John Jainschigg at 09:07 AM  Permalink

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