You know what I mean. Just don't. Please. I suppose the academic nod by the senior professor to encourage the postgrad giving their first paper can just about be understood, but it's patronizing as hell.
But maybe I'm wrong to get so wound up about academic conference nodding. According to some research, nodding is about 'self-validation'. Says Prof.Richard Petty, “If we are nodding our heads up and down, we gain confidence in what we are thinking. But when we shake our heads from side to side, we lose confidence in our own thoughts...nodding your head up and down is, in effect, telling yourself that you have confidence in your own thoughts – whether those thoughts are positive or negative.” So are all the academic nodders trying to persuade themselves that they do indeed think what they think they're thinking? Are the worst academic nodders those least sure of their own ideas, or most afraid of not being sure about their ideas? Are they not, actually, expressing their agreement with the speaker, or, as they often seem to be doing, signalling to everyone that, of course, they already know everything the speaker is saying, and rather better than the speaker evidently does him/herself?
So, maybe the nodding serves a purpose. It still makes me want to strangle people, though.
3 comments:
I am guilty of academic nodding at conferences. I think I do it to mark a thought corporeally, so that I can remember to return to it in my own thinking later. It's especially pernicious when I mutter under my breath, "Yeah, yeah, yeah." But I'm convinced, I think, that no one else can see me go through these antics, that they're for my own mnemonics alone.
I will defend - to the death! - my right to nod. On the other hand, I also, er, tend to sneer rather visibly, and roll my eyes. Bad, bad, bad, bad form in a young'n - so I've learned to restrain myself in all environments but the grad seminar room. My classmates just have to cope.
But don't you like to see nodding in an audience? It's more reassuring than doodling and window-staring-out-of.
And now my compulsive commenting is at an end.
Ideally I suppose I'd want an absorbed, rapt look, accompanied with furious scribbling, at least when I'm presenting.
There are only certain kinds of nod that truly rile me, but they are usually the kinds that proliferate most widely. A proper nutology is needed, to discriminate the good and the pardonable from the truly obscene.
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