Failure Modes of Panels

[alecaustin]

"The Failure mode of Clever is 'Asshole'." -John Scalzi
Apropos of sartorias's post on con programming and my previous post on critical discourse, I wanted to (briefly) talk about common ways that panels can fall apart, and then dig into why they rarely achieve a level of discourse beyond that of an undergraduate seminar.

(Also, Scalzi's point is pithy but

Comments

[txanne]

Can I add a failure mode? Your ideal panel is pretty close to mine, too, and those people can all share a conversation. But I'm sure we've all been to panels where there were just too many people at the table.

[alecaustin]

Oh, sure. Too many people is a definite failure state.

I should probably make the incompleteness of the list more explicit, and also explicitly invite folks to add more in comments.

[mrissa]

Looking at Minicon panels, I am also concerned about the opposite.

Specifically, one person does not a panel make, although with the right person a presentation of other kinds can be wonderful. (Missing Dr. Mike this week. Sigh.)

I think when it's not explicitly an interview such as GoHs often have, a two-person panel is also a mistake. Two people being asked to spontaneously carry an interesting conversation, even with the help of the audience, is often too much to ask; three is very borderline, in my opinion.

[swan_tower]

Yeah, panels (like tabletop RPGs, now that I think of it) usually work best at 4-5 people. It's a very narrow range.

Adding something to the list of failure modes, though it's really a subset of #2: any panelist who starts out by saying "I don't really know why I'm on this panel" should be ejected on the spot, or else beaten with the You Write Fiction For A Living; For God's Sake Make Something Up club.

[swan_tower]

I'm not sure that panels are the place for graduate seminars, for the simple reason that graduate seminars -- by their nature -- are composed of and designed for people with a certain minimum of familiarity with the topic, which is not the case in the performance genre of convention panels. To pick the example of one of my best graduate courses: Henry Glassie had us talking about the process of writing ethnographies in anthropology and folklore. We referred each week to the text all of us had (at least theoretically) read, and compared it to other ethnographies -- Clifford Geertz got brought up a lot, as did Claude Levi-Strauss -- and flung around terms like "emic" and "etic" because we could trust that we all shared the same vocabulary. This is, in my experience, most comparable to a group of professional-but-newbie novelists sitting around jawing about the finer points of craft. Not so much like a panel

[mrissa]

You use a phrase that interests me here: "the performance genre of convention panels."

I think there's a split in how people consider conventions. For some, they are events at which The Talent performs to entertain The Peons. For others, they are events in which the whole group is collaborating. Both kinds have panels, but the general attitudes tend to be different. And I prefer the latter, substantially because it's more likely to result in interesting conversations and less likely to result in people wanting to hear someone drone on with platitudes simply because they're famous. (I have seen a lot of people go into some of the most boring failure modes because they are Big Name Authors and have done panels a million times before--so they have the set of stuff they Always Say, and dislodging them from that is nearly impossible

[swan_tower]

I don't view the performance model as being "The Talent performs to entertain The Peons." I see it as being aware that there are people listening other than the one you're addressing at any given moment, and doing your best to make what you're saying more broadly engaging to them. (We've all seen a pair of panelists get into a back-and-forth that ends up being boring to everybody else.) Which applies to online discussions, too, but not to the same extent, because there the discourse model can permit fragmentation. Also, a live panel makes use of timing and delivery in a way that text doesn't, usually for humorous effect. I've noticed that I'm much more likely to hear people say "that was a great panel" afterward if the discussion was witty. The best, of course, is if it was witty and substantive, but I more often hear it about witty-but-slight panels than I do about substantive-but-sedate ones. Humour is very, very effective at making people engage with the discussion, whether they speak up or just listen

[swan_tower]

I should note that when I start talking about performance, my folklorist hat is usually on my head. I mean that word in a much broader sense than its common meaning. If I'm hanging out in the bar at World Fantasy talking to my fellow authors, I'm performing there, too; I'm playing the role of Marie Brennan, Fantasy Author. This is what I mean when I talk about how lots of us are introverts who can play extroverts for about the space of a weekend. When I'm at a con, I flip a switch that puts me into a much more social mode than I usually operate in -- one that is, I hope, a good conversationalist -- and that's a performance, not much different from when I'm on a panel. But I'm the audience for other people's performances, too; I'm not up on some stage looking down at everybody else. We're all trying to be witty and engaging for each other.

[wshaffer]

It's really a subset of #2, but one of my peeves is a panel participants are incredibly unprepared or unqualified to talk about the topic. (I remember a particularly ghastly example from a Gallifrey convention of a few years back. The topic was roughly "racism, sexism, and homophobia in Doctor Who". The panel started with one of the participants reading the panel description, seemingly for the first time, looking at the audience in bewilderment, and saying, "People actually think there's homophobia in Doctor Who? You guys do know that Russell [Davies] is gay, right?" If someone had had the guts to kick the entire panel off and replace them with fans from the audience who were knowledgeable about the online discourse that had been going on about these issues in the show, the panel would have gone much better

[swan_tower]

Having used that phrase myself as a moderator, I think it has an important function, which is to bring out into the open what assumptions are in the panelists' heads. If people take it to mean they have to nail down what the term means, that's bad -- nobody ever agrees on definitions -- but it helps avoid the problem of getting ten minutes into a debate on space opera or whatever, and only then figuring out that two panelists are disagreeing because they're talking about different kinds of books. The definitional question is one that should be used briefly and lightly, to locate the field before everybody starts dancing in it.

[wshaffer]

Yes, the real problem is that I've attended too many panels that began with defining X that also ended with defining X.

[rysmiel]

"first, we need to start by defining what we mean by X"

I think there's a definite place for this in possibly rescuing a worthwhile panel from one with a poorly written or overly broad description.

[marycatelli]

The program description is not much of a hindrance with the right mix of panelists. Especially if the title and description don't seem to go together and we just pick the one we want.

[marycatelli]

Mix is important. I once was on a panel with a person willing to monopolize it. I could speak if I was firm, but whenever I shut up to let another panelist speak, he took it back again.

[alecaustin]

Right, I do tend to feel that panel composition and moderation are more important than panel topics, in general.

panels that fail for me

[careswen]

I enjoy panelists who aren't full of themselves. I'm trying to think of positive and constructive ways to support my point, but either I can't or I don't need to, I'm not sure.

I enjoy panels that welcome input from the audience, instead of treating them like Peons there to worship the panelists. Yes, the focus should be on the people who have the most to say and have volunteered their time to say it. But as an audience member (which is not a synonym for sycophant), I occasionally have comments that aren't questions, and I don't see why my input shouldn't be respected. As a panelist, I welcome input from the audience that contributes to the discussion.

So basically, for me, a panel fails when the heads at the front of the room are too damned big.

Re: panels that fail for me

[careswen]

Ooh, here's a constructive point: pameladean is an excellent example of a brilliant person who is not full of herself, and therefore I love her on panels. She has a great deal of knowledge and critical insight, and yet she's humble and quite a dear.

Obviously, I'm not going to be so rude as to publicly name opposite examples.