You have now given us two very beautiful descriptions of two very different
and yet very much interactionally alive lectures. (I can only wish I had
been there...) But your reference to my msg makes me feel a need to borrow
what Jay just wrote:
>I hope no one took my views
>of the impending decline of live, bad, big lectures as denying
>the magic of interactional synchrony, the 'dance' we do with each
>other infrasemiotically as well as in recognizably meaningful
>terms.
and even to point at the wolfish irony of the constellation of "big" with "bad".
All I meant to say was that there must be a sharp difference between the
dances of co-presence and dances with a canned lecturer (now it will be fun
to see somebody blur the boundary...). Not that there can be no
interactivity in multimedial asynchrony and non-presence. But it will
necessarily be different in its modes of responsivity: it is one thing when
the speaker (sender) may set eyes on you as you listen, may sense the sum
of your collective changes of posture and face in or out of synch whith her
lecture and hear your sounds. Your breathing... Your laughing or not in the
right places... presence is two ways even when "communication" is
"one-way". If the lecturer doesn't have these things she will not know if
you are dancing with her or waltzing your own waltzes of disinterest... or
dozing off... or freezing into politeness. And you will know that she
doesn't know...
These choreographies of responsivity go on all the time in co-present
lectures even the most rigid or boring ones. In the interactively richest
ones and the sparse and restrained ones. I guess it is from their character
we can tell whether the lecture _is_ boring or interesting.
And in asynchronic non-presence... well, it just has to be a different dance.
Eva