Presentation Distractions: If You Can't Beat 'Em, Join 'Em

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In a world where media is changing, becoming faster and more interactive, the presentation or conference talk is one of the last bastions of the old broadcast model. A bit of tweeting aside, a person gets up and talks. Everyone else listens. It’s one-way communication just like decades ago.

But this old model is showing cracks. When everyone has a smart phone and access to heaps of interesting ideas, concentrating on a guy talking in a darkened room is more challenging. You can blame listeners for having the attention spans of gnats, but this is the wrong way to think about presentations, according to Christopher Fahey and Timothy Meaney in a lengthy and fascinating article for A List Apart:

Speakers blame the audience��s insatiable addiction to being connected and multitasking. They ask or even demand that audiences close their laptops. They disable WiFi so people have no choice but to pay attention to the speaker. Solutions like these, however, smack of ��blaming the user�� — user experience design��s cardinal sin. Even though audiences are often and easily distracted, audiences are not the problem.

Contemporary tech represents an onslaught of distraction that’s threatening to sweep away the old ideal of the presentation. But forget about breaking out the sandbags, argue Fahey and Meaney. It’s time for speakers to stop fighting the flow and chatter of ideas and put this constant stream of conversation to use. The writers passionately advocate a shift in control from speaker to audience:

Conventional conference wisdom is that speakers are fighting a war for the audience��s attention. On one side, there��s the speaker, armed with beautiful slides, succinct bullet points, a commanding stage presence, and a great speech. On the other side is Twitter, Facebook, e-mail, YouTube, etc. The audience is in the middle, torn between datastreams.

The backchannel irritates many speakers. But giving the speaker the power to cut audiences off from the backchannel would be, we think, the wrong solution. The speaker doesn��t need any more power. The speaker is armed to the teeth…. It��s time to empower the ….

We need to react in meaningful ways. Not just clapping or booing, but actually communicating and conversing. We need to immediately tell someone else what we thought, we need to write down what we thought to remember it later, we need to articulate exactly what we thought at the moment before it slips away.

The model of the rapt audience so enthralled by a speaker that you can hear a pin drop actually prevents this kind of meaningful reaction.

To accomplish this the authors created an experimental application called Donahue and employed it at SXSW. Based on Twitter, Donahue required,

speakers tweet their ideas (which we call ��points��) to the world as they speak — and to encourage their audiences, whether in the room or not, to respond to and propagate those ideas. Participants using Donahue are limited to viewing only the speaker��s points and the Twitter conversations of those who choose to focus on the event itself, filtering out the rest of the Twitter universe and keeping the participants centered on the speaker��s ideas.

As with most new and experimental ideas, the results weren’t flawless (too much data passed by too quickly, the authors say) but the underlying principle is compelling. Comments, blogs and social media are shifting the focus from broadcasting ideas to a passive audience to soliciting their participation and wisdom. Why should public speaking be the only holdout from this trend?

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