When organizers of a conference have a lot of good speakers and only a day or two in which to have them all speak, they organize the speakers into panels. It sounds good at the beginning: 5 speakers on stage, each giving their reply to the questions, as they arise.
This happens in other circumstances, also: 10-experts round-ups who answer the same question for an article. I dare to say that this is even the format in newspapers – you read a lot of different ideas, going from one person to another, rather than reading a book, in which a person (or a group of authors, but with the same tone of voice, and following the same argumentation principles throughout the book).
I have a problem with all of these. In public panels, articles round-ups and in reading the newspaper, you have the same issue: you can’t easily focus on the person speaking. It goes very quickly from person A to person B, and my mind can’t process the information as easily. I have trouble remembering who said what.
Solutions? Avoid conference panels, experts round-ups and reading a lot of newspapers, and focus, instead, on single-person speaking, articles written by a single person, and read books, or even magazines.
