Net Results: So who do they think they are kidding, those folks at the technology conferences with the open laptops? You know the ones. A talk or a panel session begins, and there they are, laptop flipped up to attention, gazing at the screen and occasionally - sometimes even intently - tap-tapping away, writes Karlin Lillington.
They'd have us all think they are - what, taking copious notes on the session? Creating memoranda from the fresh ideas presented by the speaker on ways to revolutionise corporate IT management or design a secure network?
Of course not. If you've ever been seated next to them - indeed, if you've ever been one of them - you will know that what is really going on is a bit of e-mail reading and sending, and a little net surfing.
So when did it become not just okay to rudely ignore the speaker at a conference your employer probably paid good money to send you to, but okay for the conference organisers themselves to facilitate such rudeness?
Yes, it is of wireless LANs and conference-only internet proxies that I speak. Sometimes the signals don't carry into the actual conference rooms and auditoriums, where the sessions are being held (not that that stops anyone from working their way through e-mail or fussing with some Word documents).
But often they do, and sometimes logging on is positively encouraged. I sat through a session recently where the net proxy address was helpfully taped to the front of the speaker's podium, just in case anyone tired of the speakers and preferred to bid on some eBay items to pass time.
Maybe I am wrong to find it somewhat bizarre that people are encouraged to play with their tech toys in front of someone who is trying to give a talk. I do realise this is the age of multitasking, and that many have no problem at all with responding to an e-mail with the hands while the ears are otherwise engaged.
Maybe I am unfairly judging people by my own utter failure to do more than one thing at a time. I can't simultaneously listen to music and write, for example, but I know 14 year olds who can do not only those two things but who also use internet messaging and fire off the occasional text message with abandon.
But the conference folks? Nope, I just don't believe that they are at one with both e-mail and speaker. I have the proof - they are always the ones who applaud the speaker about 10 seconds after everyone else because their faces are peering at their screens and they don't realise the talk just finished. Up they bob, looking startled, then start to clap. Fakers!
Into the same category I throw those who sit in meetings - you know who you are - with thumbs flying on their Blackberries. Sometimes they are also the ones actively participating in the meeting even as they write an e-mail. But those are the show offs, or the senior executives who know they won't be fired for such impudence.
The Blackberry people also form a subgroup of slackers at conferences, where during any keynote speech they can be seen, tiny screens faintly glowing in the dimmed lighting, thumbing away at an e-mail. Guys, you are supposed to be hanging on every word of that multinational chief executive's lovingly scripted keynote, not forwarding a joke to the people in the marketing department.
Call me old fashioned, or maybe it is the legacy of having taught university students for a few years (the world's experts at finding other things to do during a lecture than listen to it), but to me all this cyberspacing out in front of speakers smacks of bad manners.
If you are talking to an audience, and the audience is doing other things, one cannot but feel the audience is stating its disinterest in your talk through its actions. If, unlike university students, the audience doesn't need to be there, a speaker might start to wonder why the audience is there at all.
Though, even a university lecturer might wonder the same. When I was a student, one much-liked history professor was famous for throwing the inattentive out of his classes. He once asked a student who had the temerity to read a newspaper in the back of a packed lecture hall, if he would kindly leave as he didn't want the annoyance of his lecture on Roman history to impinge on the joy the student was receiving from current events.
When the embarrassed student indicated that he'd rather stay, the professor noted sharply that the student had already decided the newspaper was more important than the lecture and he could therefore leave. Now.
I sometimes wonder whether conference speakers aren't tempted to do something similar - ask the man in the third row whether he'd like to share that e-mail with the whole room, say. Or request that all those with open laptops leave the lecture hall.
If nothing else, at least the requests would amuse the rest of us. Yes, us, the well-behaved attentive audience members, all wishing we had laptops with wireless cards so that we, too, could be hitting "send" or buying our holiday plane tickets.
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