[Web Informant] 26 February 2009: Sidebar conversations are here to stay

[David Strom]

Web Informant 26 February 2009: Sidebar conversations are here to stay

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.