Advice from those with more knowledge and experience is always useful. This advice must be weighed against the fact that people and the world change, hence causing certain forms of advice to become outdated. In the case of lecturing, there are many online and printed public speaking and presenting guides that tell you the same things and give you the same lecturing pointers.

In this chapter, we will start by exploring some of the ways in which lecturing to today's internet generation audiences is different than in the past, hence causing certain classic lecturing suggestions and notions to be outdated. We will then focus on other lecturing concepts which are universally true for all audiences and all lecturing, presenting, and public speaking situations.

THE INTERNET GENERATION AUDIENCE

Fifty years ago, audiences would pack lecture rooms paying a substantial amount of attention to the speaker. Those audiences had not grown up with a television in their room, nor had they grown up with a permanent internet connection. The constant presence of television and the internet in the lives of today's youth has significantly modified the expectation that they have of a lecture.

The internet experience is almost entirely user controlled. If the user does not like a website, she/he can change the site or simply leave the computer. Furthermore, navigating through the internet is an interactive experience in that you choose when to scroll down, when to move forward on a page, and so on.