bad conference behavior

I’m always shocked when I go to professional conferences at how rude people can be. At CIT, audience members were generally attentive, polite, and professionally courteous, but I still saw lots of bad behavior:

• Cell phones ringing during presentations and their owners not bothering to silence them, just letting them ring and ring and ring. In one session, the woman next to me let her cell phone ring until the voice mail picked up repeatedly throughout the session. Finally, after three or four calls came in—this is not an exaggeration—I leaned over and said, “That’s very distracting, could you put it on silent mode?” She completely ignored me. She didn’t look at me, didn’t say anything. And then another call came in.
• People taking calls during presentations. Not even stepping out. Unbelievably rude.
• People very obviously sending and receiving texts during presentations.
• People very obviously planning their conference schedules, with their programs out and a notebook. I saw one man do this in the front row. I don’t understand why you would sit in the front row and then do this.

The very worst behavior I saw was in a session that would have been quite interesting, but some hostile audience members began asking irrelevant questions a few minutes into the presentation and so completely derailed the session that the presenters didn’t even get to the second half of their presentation, which was the part about application, so it was basically the meat of the presentation.

Here’s the thing. If you disagree with a presenter, there are productive ways to proceed. You could wait until the end of the presentation and raise your concerns then. You could talk to the presenter after the presentation. You could email the presenter. You could propose a session for next year’s conference that engages the issues. Lots of options. Choosing to derail a presentation is rude to the presenters, of course, but also rude to the rest of the audience. And it is completely unproductive. The rude audience member, even if he/she has an excellent point, looks like an unprofessional jerk.

I go to sessions sometimes knowing that I will disagree with the presenters. I don’t interrupt their presentation, though. I let them present, and then I sometimes raise my concerns at the end. More typically, though, if my concerns are serious, I talk to them afterwards, because the 5-15 minutes left for Q and A at the end of a presentation is only long enough to ask clarifying questions and raise issues but not actually discuss them. It’s supposed to get a discussion going, but it’s not supposed to be the “final word” on the topic. I think a good presentation is one that ends with audience members wanting to discuss the topic more.

tags: academia  conference  stupidity  whining  

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