I didn’t comment on your excellent post at the time, because enough people had expressed what I would have said (which was, essentially, that what you experienced reflected problems on the part of the audience and, to some extent, the conference organisers, not you or your presentation).

Two things have happened since then to spur me to add my 2c-worth.

1 – I have spoken at a couple of events with a live Twitterfall behind me. At both events, I first did a ‘podium’ presentation and then was on a panel. My firm conclusion is – a Twitterfall is an unwarranted intrusion into the “speaker-to-audience” dynamic, but can work for the panel setup… However, importantly, because of the angles, I was the only person on the panel who could see the audience, the rest of the panel *and* the Twitter feed. That meant I could react/contribute to all of those as inputs. If it’s not set up that way, I think it’s more likely to distract than contribute.

On consideration… if a conference organiser insisted on a Twitterfall behind my ‘podium presentation’, I would regard that as licence to depart from my script and respond directly to tweets, if I felt like it. (Imagine… suppose you called out one of the offensive Tweeters and asked them to stand up in the audience…). OK – so a pretty drastic use of ‘speaker’s privilege’ – but hey, if folks are going to impose a radically altered dynamic on you…

2 – Yesterday I spoke at an event where they also re-broadcast your SXSW presentation, as part of the agenda (with permission, I hasten to add).

It was excellent. Your content and intellectual credibility were exemplary.

Just sayin’…

Second, you can never judge how well you’re doing on stage while you’re onstage. I’ve been a performing musician for a good part of my life and done many speaking engagements. What seems to you like a terrible performance may be amazing to the audience and vice versa. I remember having a conversation with Richard Patrick (Filter) after a concert. He thought they sucked but those of us standing on stage were blown away, as were the audiences. Their performance, according to reviewers after the festival was on of the highlights.

Third, how many audience members or organizers have approached you after a speaking engagement and told you that you sucked? Probably none. Then how are you going to gt any feedback that will help you improve? Does it hurt your feelings to be criticized by the masses? Then don’t be a public personality. Otherwise grow a thick skin and learn what to ignore and what to learn from. How do you think President Obama is feeling right now? How do you think almost any Grammy artist feels after the crappy performances most turned in?

Fourth, you were thrown off because the setup was not what you expected? How many times have you done this? Live events never go as planned, you have to be prepared to deal with any circumstance. I’ve had to change a string on my bass mid-song, while continuing to play, give a client pitch on a white board because the projector broke, give a talk without my slides. Learn from Steve Jobs, practice your talk so many times that you don’t need to know what the next slide says.

Hopefully you learn from the experience. Just from reading your overview I can tell you what a big part of the problem is: too much content.

If your talk is alot to remember, and you’re talking too fast, and you still finish with only a minute left and no Q&A, you might have been talking about too much. Most people prefer quality over quantity. How can they remember so much? Focusing and offering less better. Give yourself time to breath, and for your audience time to take notes.

yours was not a ‘disaster’, but a familiar experience for any professional speaker.

I am a social scientist and for some people parts or all of my presentation at the recent TEDx might be dismissed as ‘trivial’, ‘uninteresting’ or ‘boring’. Such critics have every right to hold and broadcast their opinions. However, in so doing they are closing their minds to the possibility of understanding or as Max Weber (another social scientist; but rather more venerable and long dead) put it “verstehen” – by which (broadly) he meant to indicate that human interaction and society is so complex that it may be best understood through detailed description and interpretation. Even if this is ‘just to’ state the obvious.

It might be maintained that we “just get on with” our interactions across SNSs and so forth. My talk was not of a “how to” kind – as clearly for the audience at these events – Blogs, Twitter, Facebook and so forth are a part of everyday life. Like other social scientists (for example, Erving Goffman and more recently Anthony Giddens to name two) the concern is to “get under” the everyday, the often mundane and taken-for-granted. Something that you also pose in your talk/s.

Should this matter in our web 2.0 world? Yes – because as social life embraces or (according to some) moves “online” (an old fashioned label to some, including myself) this brings with it all the good and bad aspects of human behaviour. Indeed this shift may enhance or exaggerate and accelerate some forms of behaviour – we have all read reports of “cyber” bullying, relationships damage through SNSs “affairs” and so forth. More pragmatically, an understanding of how and why people move across social media will help in the design of better and sustainable resources. However, the study of such things is still in its infancy and conventional academic work struggles to keep up with the fast pace of change in social media and accompanying research, not to mention (difficult) audiences.

Thus, the media that we are immersed in and take-for-granted is at once strange, risky, fast, ephemeral and can even be dismissed as ‘trivial’.

Like your Web2.0 expo experience, my TEDx presentation proved to be just as interesting – Here was part of my reply on my blog : I’d like to thank my critics for their considered thoughts – I don’t (yet) have a complete answer (but then I’m not as well established, prominent or well-rewarded as the “great men” mentioned above or the other participants at TEDx) – but your responses will feed into my research and the work on my book, “Seriously Social. Social life in the network society”, where I am exploring the issues raised in my talk as well as by many others (such as yourself) in appropriate depth.

I look forward to viewing more from you danah.