Smarter Technology Talk

Yesterday I gave my first academic/professional talk in Second Life.

I’d been invited to participate in the Smarter Technology Virtual Conference Center series, a Ziff-Davis Publishing enterprise sole-sponsored by IBM. I’ve been a frequent attendee at the Smarter Technology events: they’re unfailingly first-rate in speaker quality and technical execution (which is often a problem for events managers in SL). For my money, the Smarter Technology series is vastly superior to the better-known, and more self-hyped, Metanomics series. So, I was deeply honored to be invited to speak.

I had just about exactly a day to prepare a talk and slide deck entitled “Virtual World Governance,” on both the concept  and on the upcoming course I’ll be co-teaching on the subject. In adapting to the medium, my PowerPoint presentation had fewer slides and fewer images than I’d use for a physical-world presentation, and used black text on white for easier visibility inworld, rather than the light text on dark that I prefer to cut projector glare.

I wasn’t nervous – I’ve been doing public speaking regularly, sometimes daily, for over 30 years, and I was headed to a familiar venue, audience and moderator. I was hugely preoccupied by some work stuff, but a good friend came over to amuse and distract me beforehand, so I was all primed and ready to go.

Except, I’ve had constant ongoing issues with plugging my USB headphones into my laptop: often Vista thinks they’re there and in use, but my mic doesn’t actually work, and my laptop speakers are still engaged. Of course, that happened, and it took a couple reboots, and then some fiddling with voice in SL before everything was working. Thankfully, we got sorted right at the top of the hour, and from there everything went smoothly.

Doing the event in voice was a *lot* less immersive than using text chat. I found it was much more like doing a radio interview: I was mostly mentally “present” in my home office space, gesticulating, moving around, grabbing books for reference, at one point leaving my wireless mouse across the room. Rather than swimming in the sea of backchannel audience text chat, I found myself dipping in to try to catch up at pauses. The backchannel chatlog runs 15 pages of single-spaced 10-point type, and I caught about 15% of it. I was able to pull comments and questions from chat and respond, though, so in all there was a pretty decent conversation involving the audience.

In all, though, “speaker in voice, attendees in text” really is the best way to do an event like this: it’s really not possible to do a coherent presentation in text chat, when you’re just one voice coequal with everybody else’s, whose comments are interspersed among yours. The hybrid form still allows a clear delivery of the speaker’s message, while enabling an open conversation much more than physical-world events can.

I’d timed my material just right, which was a bit of good fortune, to deliver a full hour of presentation and great conversation. I met some terrifically interesting new people, who I’m eager to follow up with.

Special thanks to friends and colleagues Sinnyo Wirefly, Bo Geddins, Zha Ewry, Rose Springvale and Chimera Cosmos for their presence and encouragement!

We’ve been invited back for an update on the class later in the semester, with the suggestion to bring a few of our students along. That should make for a fascinating event, and I’m looking forward to it.

(photo of me by Dewey Jung – thank you!)