Although the substance of the talk I gave emphasised the value of Open Source strategies of distributed authorship, the physical set-up of the discussion (speaker behind mic facing chairs containing audience) was not , of course condusive to any kind of collaborative engagement. This was not a bad thing in my opinion. It was a 15 minute talk, not something you would think likely to be improved by everyone talking at once.
However, the traditional opening for other voices comes at the end when the chair asks for questions from the "floor". This lowly status of "floor" often seems wholly applicable to those poor wretches that inhabit it because of the (often) poor quality of questions asked and the answers given.
There are good reasons for this:
1). The questioner is usually nervous.
I am always nervous about asking questions in lectures. My voice shakes and squeaks, my knees feel weak, I garble my words, or use the wrong ones, make non-grammatical sentences and am incomprehensible to everyone including myself. This is most probably because in order to ask a question in that environment you have to put up your hand (classroom traumas come to mind), a person with a mic rushes over to you and you hold it, Karaoke style, as the attention of the room swings round 180 degrees to face you. Then you have to try to control your voice while worrying about your sweaty palms and the fact that you can't remember what it was you wanted to say anyway.
2). The questioner usually doesn't actually have a question.
After most lectures I have an opinion, and am occasionally roused to speak it because I think it will be useful or relevant to the speaker and the other audience members. Any direct questions that come to mind often seem too banal to raise in that context. A question is usually something technical or simple, relating to the minutiae of the speaker's topic or experience "How many of ..." or "Did .... work..." etc... What usually happens is that someone has an opinion that they want to make known, but because of the situation they feel forced into formulating it as a question. This leads to long, rambling, incomprehensible questions that often end with "What do you think about that..." or "Could you respond to that" when often the speaker's opinion is not really needed for the point to be made.
3). The speaker doesn't have time to think about it.
In the unlikely event of a good question being asked (occasionally someone skilled enough in public speaking and with a quick tongue can do this) the speaker doesn't have time to think of a good answer. The public context and the shifting of attention (like a tennis ball) from speaker to audience to speaker adds a confrontational or competitive edge to most questions. It seems as if the speaker were to say "you've got me there" or "um..I don't know" then they would have "lost". This is an extension of a long tradition of academic debate and public/peer review that is, as Michelle Serres puts it "Based on a militaristic model of truth-finding, where the strongest competitor in an argument determines what is and is not true". The situation inevitably leads to the questioner and the speaker "defending" their arguments and really trying to cover up the weaknesses in their story rather than attempting to take on board anything that the other has said.
What I would have liked to see at this event is a more productive way of carrying on discussions. "Any questions" would be better replaced with "Does anyone have anything to say", and any non-technical questions could be continued constructively in a bulletin board or a pre-arranged q&a e-mail session (where each party has time to think up a useful answer).
Saul Albert
21/12/2000