Caveat Lector

A good discussion of the backchannel phenomenon over at Liz’s, so don’t miss the comment section. I’ve been trying to figure out why the idea squicks me so horribly.

After all, I’m a notorious two-tracker myself. I used to while away boring college lectures writing love letters to David. (Now you know.) And when a class explains for the nth time something I caught on the first through third times, my mind turns to Dragonhunt fluff. Really.

So what’s my deal?

Those CavLec readers who have seen me speak or teach know that I am a very peripatetic speaker. I actually hate podiums and suchlike speaking setups that make me stand in one place, though I can and have managed with them. I walk around. I crack wise. I make overbroad gestures. (Thank heaven for the relative formality of duster dresses. I’m not at my best giving speeches in blazers, because blazers don’t move attractively on arm-wavers, which I absolutely am.) I scribble on anything available for scribbling.

And—here’s the important bit—I do things that request an audience reaction, anything from “am I being clear?” taglines to reaction shots to one-liners to asking for questions. It’s how I check that I’m getting across.

It’s also how I pick up energy to keep talking. Talking is tiring work, I find. All by myself, I don’t really have the strength to do it well. But give me at least a few people on my wavelength, and I can keep going for hours.

I’ve been lucky. In the, um, somewhere between one and two dozen (eek! that many?) speeches and tutorial sessions I’ve given the last three or four years, I’ve very rarely had an audience that didn’t give me the cues I was after. On those occasions, however, I just plain didn’t deliver as good a presentation. I regret that, but I don’t think it unusual. It’s always easier to talk to an engaged audience; the real question here is how engaged an audience a speaker needs in order to do her best work. In my case—I really, really need that engagement.

Engagement with a backchannel is not engagement with me. If I lose audience engagement, I lose my train of thought, my assurance, my fluency. I start, in a word, to suck. (One time, in a large room, when I needed new glasses and couldn’t see my audience very well… it did make a difference, and not a positive one.)

But, you know, that’s me. Not all speakers depend on that as much as I do. I’m not at all sure Liz is correct in her assertion that experience with participating in a backchannel determines positive or negative opinion of the idea. I think it has more to do with experience on and comfort with the other side of the podium. In my specific case, a backchannel could deliver a punishing and perhaps fatal blow to my presentation style.

So the assertion that “the backchannel has always been there” is insufficient (not least because even the most ardent backchannelers have admitted that some talks don’t tempt a backchannel to emerge). When is there a backchannel? When not? What are the effects of the backchannel on the speaker? On the audience’s perception of the speaker?

What happens to the same talk in a room with or without backchannel? (Add in “private or public” backchannel and watch the research possibilities spiral.) Whom does a backchannel help? Whom does it harm?

We don’t know. And I’m afraid that the backchannelers, in their enthusiasm for their new avocation, are handwaving past a few of these questions. We enjoy it, say they, so how can it be hurting anyone?

Dunno. Let’s find out, just in case, okay?