Twitter Clatter
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“Good Morning Ladies and Gentlemen”
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“Welcome to the London School of Economics”
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“and the opening session of the Communia Conference”
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That’s what the 100 delegates to the conference heard as I stood up to speak. Because a full ten percent of the audience was online - clattering away on their keyboards, oblivious of the cacophony they were creating. How did I know for a fact that at least eight were on Twitter ready to discuss conference papers in real time? Because, as a Web Ecologist, I was ahead of the game. My fellow Web Ecologist, Gabe, had already set up an experiment to check on Twitter conversations related to the conference. (I should note here that Gabe is the first Web Ecologist – since he coined the term!)
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Then there were others answering e-mails, and one lady half way down the auditorium was even playing Solitaire (and half the audience could see what she was doing). This was another experiment: Gabe was sitting at the back of the room, observing the screens of the laptops arrayed before him.
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Well I suppose I should be grateful. At least the Twitterers were listening! Welcome to the lecture environment of the early twenty-first century.
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Not only that, but later that day the Solitare evolved into a computer-based jigsaw puzzle (=
I would be interested in knowing the statistics, if we can gather, on the number of total/average tweets sent by a Twitter user during the conference.