First, I have to confess that speaking in public is one of my biggest fears, and because of that giving presentations has been one of the greatest academic challenges I've ever had to face throughout my career. So, I guess it will not be so hard to picture me right before I have to give a talk and face the crowd: heart rate rising, cold sweaty hands, brittle voice, difficulty to swallow... and so the list goes on. Anyway, I just want to give you an idea of how hard can it be to get up of a chair and start talking, while pretending that my face is not turning into a tomato (blushing would be an understatement) and that my speech is not pushing to be thrown up at the speed of an F1 race car coming to the last lap (and of course without a single intelligible word). I guess you get a very clear picture now.
Then, what could go wrong with adding a barrier? I mean, giving a talk from the safety and comfort from your own place, just on the other side of a screen doesn't sound so bad, right? Well, that was exactly what I thought, but just let me tell you my own experience. From that, you can draw your own conclusions, and more importantly, you can test the hypothesis yourself and let me know your insights.
Me: Facing the crowd vs. facing the screen
When I started my Ph.D., my supervisor took care of pushing me to face my fears, starting with the worse one (i.e. give public presentations... chanchanchan! = however you think a scary intro sounds like). So just like a parent teaching a kid to swim, in every opportunity across the corner (i.e. seminar, class, lab meeting, and conference) he threw me into the water, encouraging me to give talks instead of opting for more (personally) convenient options like poster displaying or simply attending a meeting.
Now (while in my third PhD year), I thought it was my turn to jump, and making it from the other side of a screen didn't sound like a bad place to start. So, when one of our collaborators asked if I would like to give a virtual seminar in these times of lockdown, I didn't really hesitate to accept the opportunity and I jumped. Preparing for the jump was somewhat exciting because I really like to think about the slides and the presentation details. However, when the day of the presentation arrived my normal shaky-self start showing, which is why I normally prefer to present in the morning so I can be back on my feet as soon as possible. But this was not the case, my collaborators' institution is a few time zones apart from us so I just had to wait, and I guess that didn't really help to make me less nervous about the whole thing.
I knew I had some things on my side. One, I was comfortable at home, free of distractions and I had everything I could need at hand (e.g. water, tissues, all the information on my laptop, and a place to run out of the screen in the worst-case scenario). Also, I felt that the fact that I wouldn't need to stand and that only half of my body was visible, would make me feel more in control of the situation (I mean you couldn't really tell if I was shaking or if my hand had involuntary spasms at all). However, there were a few things that I didn't consider, and that ended up taking away half of the confidence that being on the other side of the screen had given me until that point.
The first one was the fact that I am not a native English speaker. Despite I've been an ex-pat for the last few years (which has forced me to speak in English almost 100% of the time) and I have an English speaking couple, I still have my doubts about how great my second language performs under pressure within an academic environment. The second and actually the one that became the drop that spilled the glass was somehow foreseen by the coordinator of the seminar while making a small joke at the beginning (maybe she already knew what would be coming for me along the way). She just said not to worry if I felt lonely, because they would still be "there" listening even if they had their cameras and mics turned off while I was talking. However, I didn't really had any time to think about what she was saying. I mean, I know this is a common practice because of virtual seminars I have attended since the beginning of the lockdown so I didn't really pay much attention (which now I think was for the better).
Anyway, the weight of this "prophecy" didn't hit me until I was 3/4 of my presentation down (I wish it hadn't hit me until I was done). In a second, I became self-conscious of my voice, of me speaking to a screen with no feedback in the background, no friendly face to look up to (not even someone snoring because my presentation was too boring), there was simply nothing or better no one that reminded me of why I was there at all. My brain knew that there was a bunch of people on the other side listening to what I had to say, but I guess my fear just overrode my logic and it happened: I had a blackout. While I was trying to grasp any related information my head had stored, I just started mumbling whatever I could think about the figures I was seeing... but it was like there was nothing left. It was something I had never experienced before, and I had no idea that it could really happen. I have freaked out before during a presentation, but never like this and never because of me feeling lonely speaking on my own (I am the kind that speaks to oneself very often and sometimes out loud so I thought this was not a possible scenario).
The good news is that although I felt I had hit rock bottom by then, and it took me a while to recover (like five slides more and a lot of courage), I managed to get out of that blank empty space that I know now exists in my head. I was even able to answer questions at the end (maybe not in my brightest self but all the situation considered, it was more than okay). I am not sure yet of the lesson to be learned from this experience, but if one thing has become clearer for me, it is that I underestimated the power that human interaction can have on how we perceive situations and ourselves in relation to the environment. I thought that having this barrier in between would help me feel more confident, but the truth is that for me, interacting with the audience works much better. It can be something so subtle as a gesture, and it might not even be correlated with what my speech is about but in my case, that would have made all the difference.