My question for you today is this: when is it appropriate to have a sidebar conversation during a conference call or in-person meeting? By sidebar, I meet a parallel Instant Messenger chat session or texting someone or posting something to your Twitter feed. Whatever your tool of choice, you are sharing your thoughts about what is going on in the meeting to other co-workers who are bored/distracted/uninterested with the current speaker.
I am as guilty of this behavior as the next person: back in the day when I had weekly staff meetings, we had various ways to amuse ourselves over IM chats. I remember when the precursor to the Blackberry first arrived on the scene and we would hide them under the table and check our emails – now they are so much smaller and easier to pull out and use. So much easier, that even our elected members of Congress are sending out Tweets and texts from the House floor this week during Obama’s address. Color commentary at 140 characters at a time, coming to you from those folks that pass bills that most never read. There is some irony in this situation, somewhere.
And this week, the Billerica Massachusetts selectmen passed a law that prohibits people from texting and emailing during town meetings. I am sure more will follow, maybe even our Congress.
There are professors that prohibit Internet-connected laptops (or at least try to) during their classes. Back when I taught a bunch of high school boys computer networking in a PC-laden classroom lab, I had to routinely unplug their machines’ Ethernet cables when their attention wandered to the Internet and the call of more important things, like checking and updating their overnight gaming standings. At least I had a cable to unplug: this was in the era just before universal Wifi coverage.
Call it ADD. Call it multi-tasking. Call it sophomoric or just plain rude. But this behavior is definitely here to stay. And as someone who makes part of my living as a professional speaker, I find this trendlet both disconcerting and yet fascinating. Indeed, at a speech that I gave this week, one of the participants suggested that I should show a live Web link to a Twitter feed so the audience could post their comments on screen, for all in the audience to examine. (This was done last at last year’s South By Southwest conference, to mixed results, as I recall.) First I thought it was a good idea. Now I am not so sure.
Remember how when we watched TV back in the olden times there wasn’t anything on the screen besides the program? Now we have the ever-present logo, sometimes spinning around with the time and temperature. We have little people that pop up at the bottom of the screen announcing some more “must see TV” that will be broadcast later in the week. We have the “crawl” which used to be used to announce snow or other extreme weather conditions but is its own sidebar conversation for many news shows. And Bloomberg TV has so much going on that I get dizzy when I tune in there trying to track all the various windows of data scrolling by. Even “24” shows multiple windows where each character is doing something to get across its real-time effect. (At least Chloe is back in the current season’s episode’s to save the day, we can all be thankful even if the underlying technology isn’t quite realistic.)
I am not sure where this is going, but it definitely is the brave new world of communications. Tweeting and texting during meetings is probably here to stay, regardless of what rules are put in place to stop them. And we as professional speakers will have a harder time unless we learn to incorporate these things and collaborate with our audiences, rather than competing with them. Of course, if we were more engaging perhaps all the sidebar chatter would come to a stop because people would actually want to listen to our speeches.
David O’Berry writes:
In my opinion, it is the number of streams of information required to
satiate this generation that creates an issue.
Coming up I could process a lot more than most of my peers and that
caps out around 4 streams at a time depending on what they are really.
The upper end of this new generation (my sons) has the capability to
process at a minimum 4 with most upwards 6-12 depending on their
capacity. The problem with that is the digital divide aspects are only
exacerbated by repeated exposure for some while others are starved. It
is an odd time in history.
The only thing I can say as far as interest etc. and how that matters
is that mostly it often becomes a time thing. We talked about TED and
the model they have at 18 minutes is right at the border of most
attention spans right now. I find myself even listening to them while
doing other things. How we learn has been dictated for a long time and
I am not sure whether or not the best way to learn can be codified. We
put parameters around it because it becomes easier for organizations and
universities to then execute and possibly measure but to what purpose?
The Kindle 2 is a good example of something that can begin to shift us
forward in how and what we learn. Are we restricted by what we can
process or what we have access to or simply by what we can carry on our
backs?
Bruce Robertson says:
You’ve painted an ENTIRELY negative picture. While it can be disrupting (remember us with those old radio modems during meetings doing email? 🙂 ), it can be enhancing. We do plenty of large conf calls internally, and there are definitely times when a good side conversation (we prefer it to be seen by everyone, but other scenarios also are ok) can help those not getting the baton to also comment and be commented on. It’s like a wider extension of an audio meeting. This is particularly true for cases where the participants are NOT in the same room, which is always the case for us.
Anyway, you could at least show some other cases. Very large meetings may very well need extensible interaction approaches, to extend value and avoid the straight jacket of the serialized one-to-many that is strongly controlled by the powers that run the meeting (usually).
I think it’s appropriate if the meeting is large, like in an auditorium, or maybe with a smaller crowd if it’s a product demo or something.
Strom, Does throw you off when people do it while you are speaking?
Thanks Keith. I think it is still something that speakers are going to have to adjust to, particularly those that don’t want to take questions from the podium — I like questions, because I know that people come from all different knowledge levels when they come to hear me speak, and it can be frustrating if you can’t get something clarified.