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

[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.

[wshaffer]

Many a bad panel could certainly be rescued if the panelists paused at the beginning and said, "Look, this panel description isn't workable, let's figure out what we're really discussing here." (Although in these days of email, it might be even better if the panelists worked that out before the panel even began.)

[alecaustin]

Panel participants who aren't prepared to talk about the subject are anathema, yes, though I think mrissa and swan_tower said most of what I'd say on that topic further up the thread.

I think the risk on the kind of definition you talk about is that the important part isn't coming up with a "definition" as much as establishing a common vocabulary (as swan_tower notes in her reply). It would be better if more people used that kind of language when addressing the topic, I feel, because it would help dodge a lot of the dogmatic and tendentious "But X is defined to be Y!" arguments that fans (and nerds in general) are prone to.