Each time I connect my laptop to an overhead projector, I experience a moment of mild panic. Are there icons on my home screen that point to parts of my life that I’d rather keep private? Is there a screensaver that will stream photographs of my last family vacation in painful slow motion when I take a break from my so-very-professional presentation? Am I signed into Skype, leaving open the possibility of a friend or a relative pinging loudly to say hello, or will those pesky Facebook notifications pop up on the corner of my screen just as I make my crucial point in front of a rapt audience?
The digital life creates many moments of such leakage between our private, personal, public and professional lives. However much we want to keep them separate and carefully sealed, it’s hard to keep the boundaries completely closed. Scholars of media call it “context collapse”, brought about because of our use of one device or one platform across different purposes. We use our laptops and tablets for both personal and professional purposes, storing material that serves as reference as well as entertainment, among other things. The home screen on your smartphone may have a family photograph and the multiple icons on your laptop may be sitting against a favourite shot of your pet. The labels on the folders too may be quite telling of our interests and the range of things we might “hoard” on our laptops.
Scrutiny
While we may not really have anything to hide, these “leakages” from our personal lives into professional forums sometimes create distractions that can have undesirable effects. Employers scan the social media profiles of potential candidates to get a sense of how they conduct themselves and what their broad interests might be, to judge how they would fit into the culture of the company. New acquaintances these days routinely check each other out on these networks. A lot has been written on the need to be aware of how we might be presenting ourselves across these media, even if we do not really want to get into becoming too conscious of curating our image — thus losing the spontaneity of interaction.
But let’s get back to the use of our personal laptops for a public presentation. This presents one small way in which our lives are sometimes thrown open to scrutiny, and here are some simple steps we can take to avoid the resulting distraction.
Keep your laptop home screen clean and uncluttered. Organise your folders such that you do not have scores of icons spread across the screen.
Use a relatively neutral picture for the desktop and disable the screen saver.
Sign out of any social media networks for the duration of the presentation or set your status as unavailable or busy.
Open your presentation and set it in slide show mode before you connect the laptop to the projector.
If you have links to videos or images that are not embedded in the presentation, keep those open and minimised, ready to play at the appropriate point.
Seems simple enough, right? But it is surprising how often we find ourselves watching — with curiosity and a bit of impatience, sometimes — while presenters fiddle with their laptops, moving the cursor around looking for the right file to open. Being prepared is not only more efficient in terms of time but also helps keep those leakages from happening, allowing us to maintain a professional interface.
The author teaches at the University of Hyderabad and edits Teacher Plus. usha.bpgll@gmail.com
