On Record, continued

If you know well in advance that your conference/workshop/seminar talk will be recorded and distributed widely, does this influence the content of your talk?

For example:

Would you be more likely to present old (published) work than the latest (unpublished) results and ideas?

• Would you work harder to ensure that any images you project are either entirely of your own construction or, if borrowed from another source, properly credited?
• Would you spin your talk in a different way, in recognition of a possibly wider audience beyond those present during the initial recording?
• Would you do anything different about your dress, mannerisms, voice, piercings etc. knowing that you are being recorded vs. just speaking to those you can see sitting rapt in their seats in front of you?

Before a recorded talk, I would have to think long and hard about the first issue: i.e., how much new stuff to present. I am not a raging paranoiac about having my research ideas "stolen", although thefts certainly do occur, but I'm not sure I'd want to lose control of some of my newest work by having a presentation of this work flung about on the internet. I think I might tend to leave out some of the crazier ideas that can be fun to explore in a talk, thereby making my talks a bit more conservative.

Maybe that makes for a better, more focused talk. Maybe that makes for a more boring talk. I don't know, but although recording and distributing talks has many positive consequences, recording a talk and making it available for a wider audience is not a neutral activity and would certainly have some impact on talk content and perhaps also style.