Teleconferences: Inside the cone of silence

I was presenting at a teleconference earlier this week for OneWorld. It’s a great organisation, and all my fellow teleconferencers were from non-profits, so I felt like there was a sympathetic audience on the other end of the line for my presentation of highlights from NTEN’s Non-Profit Technology Conference.

But really, I had no clue whether they were sympathetic or not.

As I was presenting, everyone else’s line was muted, so my words went completely, disturbingly uninterrupted. Not even a hushed cough or a shifting of buttocks on a chair to be heard. And, of course, there was no visual feedback. Were these quiet folk nodding? Sneering? Snoring? Cheering me on? Or wishing I’d finish? Were they, indeed, quiet at all? There was no way to tell.

Teleconferencing is a silent, squirming ordeal for presenters.  It’s not quite so bad when everyone’s an active participant, or there’s an accompanying web-based component, or some other way to provide interaction. But for a straightforward talk, it’s downright nasty.

The best part of making any presentation is feeling the mood of the audience and responding to that mood. You can start off flat and still win them over if you use the visual cues, eye contact, subtle shifting of attention to help you remould your talk to fit the room. Fat chance of that when you’re speaking in the teleconferencing cone of silence.

Web 3.0: Goodbye teleconferences? 

After my bit was over in the teleconference, the host invited questions. I’d been talking about web 2.0 sites and services and someone asked: “What do you think Web 3.0 will bring us?”

There are lots of different ideas about this. Tim Berners-Lee thinks web 3.0 will bring us the semantic web, an Internet in which computers understand the information stored on them and act as truly intelligent agents. Self-aware sites, if you will. Others talk about an intersection of small applications all working together, regardless of whether they’re on your computer, a phone or another device. Something far more sophisticated and seamless than the digital handshaking that goes on now with web 2.0 apps and services. Others think the driving technology behind web 3.0 will be improved hardware and greater bandwidth, and applications which benefit from these hardware advances.

Perhaps it was in response to the eerie quiet in which I had just presented, but I picked on the latter; the hardware-driven advances. I said web 3.0 would be the death of the teleconference. After all, there’s no reason why, with the faster connections and more powerful graphics processing coming down the pipeline, videoconferencing shouldn’t replace teleconferencing almost entirely - at least in countries with big, fat Internet pipes and generous data plans, like the US. If I can conference on Skype with my far-flung family now, then surely web 3.0 will deliver ubitquitous video interactions.

Of course, web 3.0 should herald much more than merely the death of teleconferencing. Seth Godin has an interesting take on web 4.0 and it sounds good to me. But only if I no longer have to teleconference. Without that advance, web 3 or web 4 will both be failures.

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