At science fiction and fantasy conventions, after a panel discussion, the panel moderator usually asks the audience if they have any questions.<\/p>\r\n
It used to be somewhat common for audience members, when called on, to say \u201cThis is more a comment than a question,\u201d and then to say something that wasn\u2019t a question.<\/p>\r\n
In the past few years, quite a few panel moderators have taken to explicitly disallowing that sort of thing. Before calling on audience members, such moderators explicitly say that only questions are allowed, not comments.<\/p>\r\n
On the one hand, I recognize the phenomenon that such moderators are concerned about: it\u2019s the thing where someone in the audience (usually a white man) believes themselves to be better-informed on the topic than any of the panelists, and that audience member issues a five-minute-long monologue\/rant on some minor aspect of the topic (or on a tangential matter, or on an unrelated pet peeve), and there\u2019s no way to stop them unless the moderator is willing to interrupt them.<\/p>\r\n
But in my firmly held view, the problem with that phenomenon is not that the monologue\/rant takes the form of a statement rather than a question.<\/p>\r\n
I can put any statement into the form of a question. For example, I can monologue for five minutes and then add \u201c\u2014don\u2019t you agree?\u201d to the end; and voila, I have now made a question, so my monologue is now unobjectionable. (Right?) And I can come up with questions that are far less useful and relevant than plenty of statements; for example, I can ask \u201cWhy is the sky blue?\u201d at the end of any panel, and in almost all cases, that\u2019s a lot less relevant than a statement like \u201cI really liked the point that [panelist] made; thank you\u201d would be. More generally, I have heard audience members ask long rambling incoherent questions that did not become inherently good just because they were phrased as questions.<\/p>\r\n
Also, for example, in some cases a panelist has said something actively harmful, and nobody on the panel (including the moderator) has objected, and in such cases it can be really important for an audience member to be able to speak up. And in most such cases the audience member\u2019s objection can be more usefully phrased as a statement than as a question.<\/p>\r\n
So in my view, most of the time when moderators complain about the audience making comments instead of questions, what they're really complaining about is the length, content, and\/or coherence, not the format. So I wish they would say that. \u201cPlease keep your remarks brief, clear, and on-topic\u201d seems to me to be a far more useful instruction than \u201cOnly questions, no comments.\u201d<\/p>\r\n\r\n
\u2026I think another aspect of this issue (though I rarely hear anyone say this part explicitly) is that some moderators believe that the panel consists of a set of experts on the topic, and that the audience consists of non-experts who are there to hear the panelists hold forth, and therefore that anything an audience member says should be framed in such a way as to elicit a response from the panelists; in this paradigm, the important part of the interaction is the response from the panelists, not what the audience member says.<\/p>\r\n
I have two responses to that:<\/p>\r\n
First, even if we accept the paradigm that the panelists are the important people to listen to: in conversations, we often phrase things as statements, and people reply to those statements. When humans converse with each other, they generally recognize that they can respond to something another person said, whether or not the other person explicitly framed their words as a question.<\/p>\r\n
If I say \u201cPlease say more about such-and-such,\u201d that\u2019s imperative, not interrogative\u2014it doesn\u2019t have a question mark at the end\u2014but it\u2019s nonetheless a request for information. If I say \u201cI feel like you didn\u2019t cover this important subtopic,\u201d that\u2019s not an explicit request, but it clearly leaves plenty of room for panelists to respond.<\/p>\r\n
So here, again, the relevant distinction isn\u2019t between question and comment; what the moderator really wants is for the audience to say things that will elicit responses from the panelists.<\/p>\r\n
(And by the way, I\u2019ve also seen questions-framed-as-questions that the panelists had no answer to; those were fine with me, but even though they were questions, they didn\u2019t have the effect of providing the audience with more words of wisdom from the panelists.)<\/p><\/li>\r\n
For example, it quite often happens that there are people in the audience who really do know at least as much about the topic as some or all of the panelists; there is never a guarantee that all of the most knowledgeable people in a given room are the ones who are on the panel. (And sometimes people who aren\u2019t experts have useful and interesting comments anyway.) Nor is there a guarantee that the panelists are the best people in the room at explaining things, or the ones with the most relevant lived experience, or otherwise the best and most important people to listen to listen to.<\/p>\r\n
For example, if a panel full of white people is talking about race issues (as used to happen frequently at conventions), and a person of color is in the audience, it is entirely reasonable and admirable for that audience member to make statements, and those statements are far more likely to be authoritative and informative than the panelists\u2019 statements.<\/p><\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\n
In summary: I strongly disagree with the idea that audience members should only be allowed to ask questions, not make statements, and I wish that moderators would stop framing the issue that way.<\/p>\r\n
Don\u2019t you?<\/p>\r\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"parent":5482,"menu_order":140,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-21142","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/21142","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21142"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/21142\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21234,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/21142\/revisions\/21234"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/5482"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21142"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}