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How to Design a Memorable Presentation for the Virtual World
I’ve been thinking and researching about memory lately, because I’m curious to see how our learning abilities (of which memory is a key part, of course) are affected by the pandemic. Anecdotally, I heard from a lot of people that at the beginning of the lockdown, they were struggling to process information in the way they usually did because of all the upheaval. When your life is overturned, you can’t pay close attention to new ideas.
Once we’d all settled into our new, weird routines, though, some ability to handle other information naturally returned. We stopped staring out the window and devouring our news feeds and gradually returned to real work — if we were lucky enough to still have it to do. Lots of evidence points to that work being harder to accomplish, however, because of all the distractions that the new conditions inserted into our routines. Working from home means potentially juggling the multiple roles of parent, provider, worker, leader, and partner — all at the same time.
What does this mean for speakers and the speaking world? Pivoting to the digital world for speakers means a loss of presence and impact. You can’t just give the same speech to an audience of computers as you can to an audience of sentient humans. If you want to have any kind of impact as a speaker online — to even begin to be…
