How to be an Alien

One day a little green man lands on Earth, gets out of his spaceship, comes up to you and says: "Take me to your leader".

"Aha", you think.  "An Alien."

Actually he's not totally alien.  He may appear to have more ears than you.  But he's looking at you, speaking to you and expecting a response from you.

Not so the human Alien.  This is the presenter who, after just a few moments on-stage, is able to convey the mind-boggling distances in space between one thing and another.  In this case the distance between you and him.

He achieves this alienation by talking to his feet.  To the ceiling.  Talking to the notes in his hand. To the screen. In fact talking to anything, except to you.

You know this because he isn't looking at you.  He may glance furtively in your general direction from time to time, pretending to look at you, in the same way that he’s pretending to talk to you.  But he isn't.

Because to look into someone’s eyes is to acknowledge their existence.  And that is the last thing the human Alien wants to do.

If you’re in a crowded carriage, pressed against another person like two sardines in a can, how do you cope with the invasion of your personal space?

You’re standing close enough to have a sexual encounter with a stranger who is neither attractive nor especially fragrant.  You can't get away.  This is intolerable.

There is only one thing you can do: avoid eye contact.  If you don’t look at them and they don’t look at you, you can pretend they’re not really there.

Mutual alienation – the denial of each other’s humanity – makes the journey in the crowded carriage unpleasant, but possible.

The human Alien doesn’t look at you and so denies your existence.  Whatever his ethnicity, his colour is green.

I once met a little green man in the form of a lecturer at a university.  We were talking about presentation nerves and he said: “Oh, I have no problem with that at all.  What I do is focus my attention on the ceiling at the back of the room.  There’s a little bit in the left-hand corner where the plaster has dropped off.  I talk to that.”

For the learned professor, his students didn’t really exist.  If, while he looked at the ceiling and banged on for fifty minutes, one of them had died – possibly from self-strangulation in a desperate attempt to escape – he wouldn’t have noticed. 

There are university lecturers who would see nothing odd about this approach.  "Students being what they are", they would say, "you may as well talk to a wall."

But it’s not a strategy that makes for an engaging presentation, because people want to be talked to.  As a minimum, they expect to be looked at.

Some say that when you have a large audience, it’s impossible to look at every person.  Not true.

It takes about a second to look at someone.  Let’s say you have an audience of 300 people, and five minutes. In that time you can look at each individual once.

In a 20-minute presentation to the same number of people, you can make eye contact with each individual four times.

I’m not suggesting you should scan mechanically around the room back and forth like a light-house.  That would be most disturbing.

I’m saying that the reason why the human Alien avoids eye contact has nothing to do with logistics.

Instead it has a lot to do with the philosophy of the ostrich, rooted in fear.  If I can’t see you, then you don’t exist, so you can't be a threat.

The human Alien doesn’t really want to talk to you.  So instead, he talks to an object.  The trouble is, objects can’t hear.  So as no-one is listening, he ends up talking to himself.