Jackie Danicki

Jeff Clavier links to Heather Green on the subject of trying to give a talk at a conference and seeing most of the audience peering into their laptops instead of giving you their full attention. Heather writes:

Maybe people were blogging. Or maybe they really had no interest in anything I or the other folks on the panel were saying. But that doesn’t make sense, because why did they chose to be there then? Either way (and I know folks have been complaining about the whole conference culture) I don’t think there is anything inherently bad about a conference structure. It’s a good way to bring people together. But if the problem is interaction or a desire to get more out a conversation, doesn’t it take two sides to address that problem?

Jeff attends more conferences than most people I know, and says that because his companies don’t stop operating just because he’s at a conference, he needs to keep up on email and his RSS reader even when he’s away. His conclusion:

Is this behavior rude ? Probably for now, but in a world of continuous partial attention and extensive crackberrying, it will become less and less noticeable.

My immediate reaction to that is that just because a rude behaviour gets adopted by a lot of people, it doesn’t become less rude. It just means more people are more rude than they previously were.

That said…I can understand that need to keep up on things, and I sometimes bring my laptop to events outside the UK so that I can liveblog or photoblog them in real-time. (This laptop thing is not such a big deal here in the UK, because free wifi is almost non-existent, and for-pay wifi has only recently become more widely available.) I used to have a crackberry of my own (an iMate JAM), and when its online connections were suddenly hosed, I did not bother to re-set them and get connected again. Being disconnected was so welcome that I realised constant connection didn’t help me much, overall, in productivity terms.

What’s more uncomfortable for me are the home life parallels. As Beth Campbell wrote recently about how she and her husband are considering banning the use of laptops in their home after dinner:

Two people, not quite watching television, ignoring each other while they each stare at a laptop screen, that might be the saddest vision ever, right there.

I think the answer to all of this might be very strict, self-imposed deadlines for this kind of work. When your mindset is, “Well, I have all night to get that done,” it so often does take all night. When you’re thinking that you absolutely must put the laptop away by 8PM, you…by which I mean I…spend less time getting all hot and bothered at Etsy.com while the document you really need to edit sits open in your taskbar for the 3rd straight hour.

So what I’m really saying is, half-listening to speakers for the lures of your laptop is rude, and I hope we all realise that we’re no more ahead of the game for constantly checking email and feed readers than we would be if we just checked them a few times each day. (Julie Morgenstern’s deceptively titled but excellent Never Check E-Mail In the Morning : And Other Unexpected Strategies for Making Your Work Life Work goes into much more depth on the true value of multitasking and constant connectedness.) Adapting to rude behaviour so that it becomes acceptable is one of the worst things we do to ourselves, and the last thing any of us needs as individuals is more rudeness from other people flowing through our lives.

Filed under: Communication, Home, Individuality vs Collectivism, Manners, People I Know, RSS Subscriptions, Technology, Work