Question

How does social media play a role in mediated public speaking? If yes, how so?

What has been your experience?

Answer 1

Social media have provided a lot of potential benefit for mediated public speaking. However, it has led to set of challenges too that poses threat to effective public speaking .

Social media provide an opportunity for real time feedback which one can get by comments and status update of audience. These feedback can be used to calibrate the speaking instantly as per demand of situation.

One can reach a larger audience with the help of social media as compared to traditional public speaking . Social media has extensive reach , transcending all boundaries and divisions.

A better communication can be established between speaker and audience if speaker replies to comment and status of audience. Audience feel more connected to speaker once they begin to feel that speaker is responding to their question actively.

However , it poses certain challenges too. If audience start to feel bored , then they can go back to social media and thus they lose interest in speaker. So , it provides a potential source of distraction that makes public speaking much more difficult.

My experiences

I was to address a batch of student through video conference in my alumnus college for junior batch. I passed out a decade back and there was various changes across all dimension of today's college life when compared to ours. So, social media helped me observe some of these changes and take them into account while designing my speech. Moreover ,after the speech , I got lot of feedback from students and I realised some of the mistakes but overall student were satisfied.