Maybe it is because monitors are a lot less expensive than they used to be, but I’m seeing more and more of them cropping up, often in the same places. Conference rooms or spaces for larger presentations that used to have a single monitor or a projector screen now will sometimes have two or more large monitors either mounted on the same wall or scattered around the room. Courtrooms are no exception, and have also seen their share of monitor proliferation. This means that for your next opening statement or CLE presentation, you might be faced with the expectation of showing your slides on more than one screen.

From a perspective driven purely by technological functionality, multiple monitors can be seen as a good thing, raising the chances that anyone seated in the room will be close to at least one monitor they can choose to look at. But I think that multiplying the monitors has a negative effect on the way we present and the way we watch presentations. I am a fan of making full and smart use of audio-visual capability, but I am not a fan of using multiple monitors to display the same thing. Duplicate monitors can interfere with an audience’s focus and attention, and they can change the speaker’s relationship to the visuals and to the audience. In this post, I’ll flesh out that argument and suggest what speakers should do instead.

The Problems With Duplicate Monitors:

Destroys the Single Focal Point

An audience should be defined by the collective experience of all looking in the same direction at the same thing. Monitors all showing identical visuals may aid visibility, but only by fragmenting the audience’s attention and experience. This problem also extends to the individual monitors in the jury boxes in some federal courthouses. It is a different experience for everyone to be looking at their own monitor instead of collectively looking at the same monitor. The experience is even worse in some conference rooms where there is a monitor at each end of the table, or wide presentation rooms with a monitor on each side, so you have audience members looking in completely opposite directions. If they were watching only what is on the screen, that is one thing; but in a presentation, they should also be watching the person presenting. That person should be standing near the screen as a combined focal point. But when there’s more than one screen, that isn’t possible.

They Add Cognitive Load

While I am not aware of the specific issue of multiple redundant monitors being researched, it would be in line with prior findings if we learned that having many monitors in view increases the cognitive load on the audience.  An audience member might think to themselves, “The screens are showing the same thing, so I need to just pick one and look at it.” But if you watch an audience facing multiple screens, it is common to see them looking back and forth at each of the monitors, as if their brain has to convince itself that it really is the same information. Even if it isn’t actually harder to work with multiple screens in front of you, it does make for a setting that is busier, more visually cluttered, and more distracting.

They Limit the Speaker’s Interaction With Their Visuals

It is important that the speaker remain a speaker, and not be reduced to just narrating the slides. Part of being a speaker is interacting with the visuals, and not simply letting them stand on their own. So it can be a very important moment when a speaker or an advocate strides to the screen and points the audience’s attention toward something on the screen. Yes, there are technological ways to highlight something so it shows on all screens, but a moving red dot will never be as dramatic or as rhetorically effective as the speaker stepping up to a screen and physically pointing.

What to Do Instead?

Picking one monitor and turning the others off is the obvious alternative. As long as the remaining monitor is easily visible to everyone, that might be the best way of keeping a single focus. In one recent presentation setting, however, I was speaking in between two very large monitors that were equally prominent, and it might have seemed odd to turn one of them off. What I tried instead was using both, but for different purposes. One monitor carried the headings, while the other included the content. That took some practice advancing the slides correctly on both, but it did have the advantage of making for one coordinated, and not duplicated, visual display, and of keeping the headings visible at all times.

Ultimately, technology should serve the speaker and the audience, without being overly intrusive. The ideal is to get back to the most basic setting of interpersonal communication with one person looking at and listening to another. The advantage of a single collectively-viewed monitor or screen is that everyone is looking in the same direction.

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Image credit: 123rf.com, used under license