The Evening of Economics 2018 was the perfect example for a typical and an atypical Speaker-Listener-Situation. What we saw during the event, was a many different speakers and their different ways of communicating with the audience.
One speaker, for example, had a very open and sociable body language. He specifically tried to build a connection with the listeners by calling himself as one of them. He has done this by often using pronouns like “us” and “our” to make the listeners feel part of the conversation. In this way he didn’t fit in the typical Speaker-Listener-Situation, which we are usually use to from our time at school, where the teacher is the only one talking, and the students have listen without interacting mostly.
His whole attention was on the listeners and not on any of the technological devices, which were added in the background to the speech to give the audiences more information, even still the speaker had the control of the technological devices, he didn’t use this medium for the communication.
As opposite of this example there was another speaker during this evening who focused much more on technological devices than on the audience. The reason for this could be that he planned his speech around the projected content on the wall. Even though it felt like that in this way he didn’t create an interaction with the audience.
The use of projectors and other technological devices could be in some cases helpful, like when you are using visual graphics to make a difficult topic simpler and thus easier. But in this way, there is a higher risk that the audience will focus less on the speaker’s spoken content to try to concentrate on trying to understand its visual content.
In these cases, a greater level balance is needed to keep the audience on the track but unfortunately this was not the case here. This is why in my opinion the latter speech was weaker than the previously mentioned one.
Except for a few exceptions, the absence of interaction was mostly present during the interventions, this is because the level of interaction in a speaker-listener-situation is lower, than in an open discussion. The coffee break was instead used to make deeper contact with the speakers. In this way the whole speaker-listener-situation developed into an interaction at the same eye level. A large number of small groups of three or four participants could be observed. Visitors and speakers used this time for discussion and exchange of contact information.
Compared to the “interaction” during the speeches, the interaction during the coffee break were a typical example of communication within a large number of participants: instead of a single communication group, several smaller communicating groups were formed with a greater lever of interaction.
Nice discussion and observation of different speaker styles and how they shape interaction among people. I suspect that during the coffee breaks, you would also be able to observe different interactions based on rituals and professional status?