Back-channel communications or bad manners?
Howard Lake | 24 February 2009 | Blogs
I am now officially running the risk of standing in the path of a relentless tide of digital technology progress and drowning as a result. I don’t buy into every new gizmo and gadget straightaway, either professionally or personally, and therefore, according to some, I am a fuddy duddy.
A respected acquaintance and founder of The Charity Place, Rachel Beer, found an article outlining how the emergence of technologies like twitter is creating a communciations ‘back channel’, forcing us to re-think how we address groups of people during presentations or talks.
In summary, we should expect audiences to pay increasingly less attention to the speaker and content and for real-time, virtual conversations to develop all over the venue; this is ‘the back channel’. The author then outlines in some useful detail, why this is a positive step. For example:
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- The audience is engaging with the subject matter and posting questions / receiving answers from peers around the room (doesn’t say whether for good or bad reasons!)
- Feedback on the presentation is gathered much more quickly as the presenter (or their helpers) can follow the tweets (posts on twitter) and react or answer questions accordingly
- By having feedback on twitter, a much wider audience than those able to attend will be exposed to interesting content
- The audience are actually participating in the event if someone is watching the posts and content can be flexed on the fly (a bit like comedy improvisation)
- The overall volume of ideas generated should be larger than those incorporated into the original presentation alone
These all make sense and paint a very positive picture of the incorporation of this technology. Initially, I had a few knee-jerk reactions; ‘this is simply disrespecting the speaker’, ‘just being rude by typing instead of listening’, ‘why can’t people concentrate for more than 5 seconds on one thing?’. My personal favourite was; ‘are our social skills really that bad that we can’t manage to frame a question if we don’t understand something?’.
However, once I’d calmed down, I concluded that this seems to be a good idea. Broadening audience appeal and encouraging interaction is key to working with any group and the new skills required of the presenter (and their on-line-following-team) would be worth learning to achieve better results for all.
AS LONG AS ‘THE BACK CHANNEL’ IS NOT FORCED DOWN EVERYONE’S THROAT! And this is my point. It doesn’t matter how good an idea is, seldom will it be perfect for all members of an audience.
Have you ever tried to concentrate on a train whilst the person next to you is holding an intrusive phone conversation or playing their ipod so loudly you can hear it too? Quite rightly, many social marketing pounds are being spent on getting us to respect our surroundings. So, why would we think the sound of a room half-full of laptop keyboards being tapped is going to be any different?
I’m tired of being accused of ‘old school thinking’ just because I don’t prefer to live my life 100% on-line. This seems to be the put down of the moment from technophiles who believe that unless we change everything about the way we do everything, it must be wrong. Yes, there is plenty we can and should change with useful technology but the status quo is not always wrong.
The way I pay my mortgage is through the generation of real-world ideas which help organisations to achieve their objectives. It’s not too old school thinking to be successful is it?
So, let’s use the back-channel and other channels effectively; even a fuddy duddy like me would love to present to an audience who can comment on the content and suggest ideas for discussion on the fly. But, I will be thinking about how I can achieve this for everyone in the room, not just those who have a blackberry with them.
I’ve started a poll on the forum pages to see what people think so please add your views to the discussion if you have 5 minutes.
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.