Conference Twitting
A couple days ago fellow webcoherence author Ian Angell wrote about the clatter he (and 80 other people in the room) were constantly immersed in during the first day of the Communia conference. Ian closed with ‘at least the twitterers were listening’ – which is at least partially true.
But this whole twitter-during-conference thing is an interesting phenomenon. On one side, it’s rude – typing instead of listening, talking about the speaker as if they aren’t even there – and yet on the other side it creates a whole backchannel of information. Sure, there are the usual idiots – you can’t fill a room with educated geeks, lawyers, and businessmen without finding some are actually 4-year olds once you give them anonymity – but it serves it’s own niche, and has it’s own culture.
I mean think about it. By participating in the #communia hashtag, I met, virtually, other twitter users who follow the same topics, and now have a greater source of noise – I mean information with which to use. These conventions – hash tagging, tracking by subject, forming a backchannel community of shared knowledge to be referenced later – all came together through the designs of users, not admins in the ivory office of tweeting. And further, it’s become pervasive enough that it has been recognized as socially acceptable, not rude, and papers exist on how to maximize the microblog backchannel! This is despite the heckling! Emergent phenomena indeed.
And to what effect does this have? It depends on your point of view. I’ll say that in the afternoon, when most attendees lost internet access, I found it much easier to concentrate on the speaker’s content and not what my fellow attendees were saying. But, I also was not gaining the oft-cited value of what the other people felt was important – and what sucked - through their comments and what they chose to broadcast to their personal twitterstream.
Indeed, if I really wanted to get technical I could go in and see what the different types of twitter ‘animals’ there are… or you could.
Related posts:
Things are changing rapidly. I thought people get angry when they get distracted. But now I can see the reverse happening – People love getting distracted. Some statistics to support it – 206 Twitter updates by 11 people in less than 15 hours on #communia. This directly translates to 206 distractions – all self invited. And this count of 206 is only with the hashtag #communia, I am sure there were other Twitter updates from Twitter users sitting in the conference without the hashtag. Interestingly, this does not include the attempts these users made to read updates on their twitter homepage. So whats the exact count of these distractions like? One thousand? or even more? Now I can see a perfect reason why people need Yoga classes to increase concentration at work!
I was one of the twitterers at #communia. When the speakers were good the tweeters were microblogging and sharing observations with their own followers as well as the community using the hashtag. But some of the speakers were, to be generous, not very relevant or interesting and they were the subject of some barbed comments.
Did the tweeting distract me? No I don’t think so, I always get distracted when the speaker is boring. I saw several people surfing to unrelated sites, booking hotels, restaurants etc. Even a critical tweet stream seems more relevant.
Overall 20g tweets for #communia leaves a real time record of people’s observations and comments that may be of value to someone. Who knows?
I’m on a fence. I twitter. I found value out of tweeting at Communia, both direct (seeing what other people saw was important and how they viewed it) and indirect (social connectedness backchannel.) I fully comprehend the fact that the backchannel has become a oft-useful reality – if not necessarily always for the speakers – this is why I link to some of the other discussions on the subject above.
But I did find it much easier to force myself to listen to the more boring speakers in the afternoon. Even though by that point I desperately needed coffee. And as you may have noted on Ian’s post on twitter-clatter – there was indeed even someone playing solitare (later a jigsaw puzzle.) We do distract ourselves, twitter or no. An effect of technology as a whole, not one aspect of it.