The Medium is the Message

I'm a pretty engaging speaker. No, really, I am. I'm going strictly by what other people tell me. When I give presentations, people laugh, nod, agree, disagree. But the evaluations have always come back positive.

Until recently. I gave a presentation at a forum I won't identify because I was floored -- floored, I tell you -- by how hostile the evals were (and I still haven't decided whether I should be embarrassed for inspiring the comments or they should be embarrassed for having been so wrong about me). Part of the responsibility with the bad evals clearly is mine -- I knew I was going into a predominantly powerful white male Boomer room (and when I say "predominantly," I mean predominantly -- and when I say "powerful," I'm talking about people with even more power than your ordinary white male Boomer), and I made no apologies for being positive about Millennials, critical of Boomers, and insistent that those who fail to get up to speed on the Millennial ethos will fail on a large scale. I also pointed out that the Boomers were largely the ones who had raised the Millennials they so derided (and those miserable Xers, too, while we're assigning blame). So, in the evals, instead of words like "pertinent" and "funny," I read words like "smug" and "horrible." I do take some solace that I wasn't called "horribly smug." So it clearly could have been worse.

I did learn from the experience, though. While I'm an entertaining speaker, I shouldn't accept invitations where I'm part of "the entertainment." While I like to joke that I'm only slightly more sophisticated than a trained monkey, I'm actually a woman on a mission, and the mission is to open the eyes of legal educators that change is coming and that -- while the students still have to adapt to them -- they have to adapt to the students. The people who find my presentations useful -- and, yes, entertaining -- are people who have some incentive to change their perspective or behavior to either make their own lives easier or to make the lives of their students easier. The truth is, though, that some people have attained positions in their lives that don't *ever* require that they change themselves to make their lives easier; they issue orders to others and that's what makes their lives easier.

And honestly? I just have problems with authority. And I'm okay with it. I've had a looooooooooooot of therapy, and I've adjusted a looooooooooot of my thinking over the years. But I'm still left with an overarching lack of affinity for authority (except, of course, for those in authority who also lack an affinity for authority -- those people, I dig with a capital D, and you know who you are). I'm an Xer. To a large extent, when I present, the medium is also the message.

So I don't apologize to the Boomers who found me smug and horrible. But I do apologize to the Millennials and Xers whose message I failed to effectively deliver to some pretty powerful Boomers. I got cocky. Thought I could make the message palatable to anyone. My bad.

The video below, though, cleverly expressed what I clumsily tried to express at the Meeting of Powerful White Men. It's how I see the Boomers v. Millennials issue. And it seems to be how the Millennials see it, too.