The Lecture

Sitting in Boundless Plains in Manhattan, I read this in the Times this morning:

Divorced from the academic context, lectures have negative connotations. A lecture functions as a knuckle-rape, a don’t-do-it-again form of verbal deterrance. But lectures used to qualify as entertainment, with traveling speakers trekking from town to town, obliging a populace eager for diversion and instruction. P.T. Barnum built a lecture hall into his American Museum -- alongside the trained bears and the mummified mermaid -- as one more attraction.

…

“There is something elemental, ascetic about the lecture and the way it strips performance to its simplest constituent forms -- a speaker, an audience, a stool if you’re feeling fancy. Besides, you can only sit through so many kick-lines and dysfunctional family get-togethers before the idea that you might be made to think as well as to feel tantalizes.

What if we took presentations this seriously? 

What is the difference between a presentation and a lecture? A reliance on slides? Too many words squashed onto the screen as a stand in for a performance that wows? Or maybe words on a page that bypass the role of feeling? The primacy of thinking over feeling?

If I had to choose between a kick line and slide deck, I'm going with the dancers every time. But we never make that decision when we step up to the podium to present an idea. The question, then, is, how do we bring feelings back on stage?