Cross-Cultural Blog

I have to compliment the students on both sides of the screen for their efforts to engage with the many issues raised by the changing framework of this workshop. This time, we reworked material from earlier sessions into the format of a "virtual auditorium", trying to do as much as possible with all of the students together in two physical rooms, one on each campus. This approach raised particular technical requirements, leading to some of the technical difficulties we experienced which, thus, could be viewed as discoveries rather than mistakes. My particular interest in this program is seeing what becomes of the actual practice of oratory (often referred to in traditional rhetoric as the "Fifth Canon") in the context of virtual communication. The Fifth Canon historically was about presentation skills, and how a speaker adapts to the needs of a live audience in order to best deliver a message. But there are modern rhetoricians (including the former director of Stanford's CCR program) who redefine the Fifth Canon to refer to any of a larger range of skills employed to adapt the Delivery of a message to physical, electronic, and virtual circumstances. Looked at in this way, this particular workshop was an excellent experiment in the Fifth Canon on two levels: first, in the content of the workshop which focused on the use of oratorical skills in the traditional sense, and second, in the format of the workshop which was an attempt to adapt the Delivery of this learning to the framework of a mixed framework of live and virtual communication. The portion of the workshop which seemed to work most powerfully on both level (for me and for at least some of the students) was the exercise on telling and retelling a story across the divide of the virtual auditorium. Both the individuals telling the story, and the audiences surrounding them, were given an opportunity to see, again and again, the difference in the EXPERIENCE between telling a story in person or telling a story across a virtual connection. Putting the storytelling in the framework of the virtual auditorium allowed both sides to go back and forth repeatedly between seeing the story told by someone physically present and seeing it told by someone virtually present. What does this have to do with my own work in the corporate sector? The embrace of virtual conferencing in the corporate sector has actually been much slower than the available technology would permit. I regularly see conference rooms equipped with videoconferencing technology which is obviously going unused. I believe that one reason for this timelag is that virtual communication imposes demands on speakers to communicate on camera which, until now, were usually only experienced by professional journalists and highly experienced performers working in film and television. Not only that, but the clear, coherent images which we are so accustomed to seeing on television represent the result of considerable investments in personnel and equipment to ensure that the transmission of the virtual image is effective. And I think that corporate leaders recognize that it is going to take time for us to learn how to communicate effectively via virtual transmissions WITHOUT having available producers, camermen, lighting and sound technicians, and trained professional presenters who have spent years learning to work in front of cameras. (Not to mention the fact that live television transmissions are the exception, rather than the rule, and are usually tightly scripted in advance to ensure effectiveness.) In effect, the creation of a virtual auditorium to do live classroom exercises is an experiment in using interactive television for teaching purposes, without any of the production expertise or facilities which are part and parcel of ordinary television production. So, of course, there is much to learn, and many technical issues can come up. Many of the corporate executives whom I work with are, almost inevitably, older men and women because it takes time to rise through the corporate hierarchy. Asking them to learn how to adapt to working with the best camera angles and so forth can be challenging, even in the context of a simple live presentation where there image will also be projected on a large screen in the auditorium. Giving them the additional training so that they can function effectively on camera in improvised real time conferencing is a challenge which, frankly, we may never meet. But the students participating in this program can start to get hip to everything they will need to learn along these lines now IF they are aware of the fact that there IS learning to be done. Most of what they need to learn is a matter of practice. That is how performers of any kind (whether on television or otherwise) learn to do it. So, this session was an invaluable opportunity for the students to start to have an experiential sense of the kind of learning they need to do in the future to be most effective in virtual communications. As for me, well, everything I just wrote is something I have just now thought out for the first time, representing insights I would not have had without the actual experience of this latest workshop. So, the session was intellectually explosive for me, fireworks once again. I am more convinced than ever that ever step in this program of various virtual hookups centered at Stanford is like the flights which the Wright Brothers took at Kitty Hawk as they began exploring manned, mechanical flight. Whether the flight goes smoothly, rough, or even crashes, is irrelevant to the value of the learning derived from the experience. And, the experience is part of the beginning of a massive shift in human behavior, whose implications and development will play out, not in terms of weeks or even years, but decades of global developments in the future. There is one cross-cultural issue or question I would like to pose here for comment. Several students on the Swedish side of the CCR cross campus workshops in October and in February mentioned the fact that the reactions of the audience had an impact on them during the transmission in chain storytelling exercise. In October, the story was told across a chain of small group rooms, in February, between two virtual auditoriums. But the reaction of several Swedish students was the same both times. They mentioned that the laughter of the audience during the exercise interfered with their ability to retell the story. My impression is that they were not simply talking about the sound of laughter posing a distraction. There was a sense that the laughter contributed to a sense of uncertainty on the part of the speaker and a reluctance to go forward. I did not hear the same reaction from the Stanford students, but then I was not physically present there after the event to get this feedback. So, my question is, was this a cultural difference? Were american students affected by the laughter of the audience in the same way as the Swedish students were, or was there a greater sensitivity to audience reaction on the part of the students in Sweden?

This is the longest comments i ever read in a blog...Sweden