Hypercontext

I’m not claiming the word “hypercontext” is completely without precedent, but I think there’s a new use for it after I brought it up at a media training day that I went on as part of the Clore Leadership Programme last week at Ashridge (the UK’s top ranking management training centre dontchaknow).

Public speaking is now without context

When you’re standing up in front of an audience, and talking about whatever it is that you’ve been asked to talk about the advice you’re given is to look around the room, make eye contact, watch the body language, don’t ‘err’, drop in a gag or two, keep it relevant, and so on.

What’s become clear to me in the public speaking I’ve been doing over the last couple of years is that you can no longer just rely on the audience an your personal delivery to get the message across. There’s a whole other audience to consider. The people watching the recording/webcast of what you’re saying, after an edit or two, via the web.

And those people watching will more often than not be dropping in via ‘ deep linking ‘ so will probably not have the background info on what you’re talking about, or know what the story is behind it.

They are viewing ‘without context’, and potentially a much larger audience than the people in the room.

Self-editing

With web broadcast comes some interesting issues. If what you say is edited (as in the famous George Bush mashups) the entire meaning of what you were saying can be changed. YouTube has now enabled timeline linking, which means that people can deep-link directly to the moment in a video where you said that, missing out the context of the words.

This is dangerous stuff, as well as being amazingly powerful.

What it means is that you have to self-edit for that audience, to make sure that if you refer to something out of context that you give a quick explanation of what it is, perhaps, not use jargon or acronyms and so on. Should you imagine everything you say without the context of the previous paragraph of speech?

Hypercontext

“the multitude of contexts that the transmission or recording of an event gains when experienced via the Internet” (can you do better?)

For me, this means that whatever people say in a video-recorded public moment means that they are now part of a hypercontext - the physical context of the environment in which you find yourself, as well as the environment of the online deep-linked video world where potentially people will be directly commenting on the timeline of the video of you saying something, remixing it, pulling it apart and changing the way it could be interpreted.

But it’s not just in public speaking ‘on stage’ environments. In the mobile-enabled world, we’ve got cameras and recording devices everywhere, so potentially we could soon reach a time when people just accept that their words are part of that hypercontext as soon as they are out of their mouths.

What does that do to political transparency? What does it do to the psyche? How will it feel if you’re constantly worried about saying the wrong thing at the wrong time?

I spoke at ContentLab a few years back, and put forward the idea that we could be looking at new startups in the future where ‘content’ is banned from a semi-public environment. No cameras, no mobile, no wifi. The complete opposite of internet cafes where people feel they can talk freely in a semi-public environment.

I think that’s probably a few years off, but seriously - what happens when we all start getting sick of the always-on, people twittering about something you did without asking you, Barack Obama’s speech writer getting humiliated for a light-hearted drunken moment, and so on.

Personally, I hadn’t realised that I’d been taking all of this into account whenever I stand up and speak. Incorporating an awareness of the hypercontext of what you’re saying is really important, and I think is something that everyone should be thinking about if they’re standing up in front of an audience.