danah boyd just tweeted a link to a blog post in which she rants in a thoughtful (and funny) way about changing patterns of interacting at conferences. The psot is well worth a read.
Her rant was sparked by essentially being told off for using online tools during a talk. her argument is that these tools help her understand better - by being able to look things up, ask questions to Twitter and even translate. And yes sometimes they contribute to not paying attention. But so do doodling, and some times even asking questions.
She sees a cultural divide between those of us who use tools this way and those who dont. She seems to be pointing to these differences being an age thing but I really dont think they are.
the use of things like Twitter at conferences does seem to engender a weird sort of response in people. A couple of months ago a colleague posted a link to a really bad piece of research about the use of Twitter at conferences. the research was bad but the interesting thing was the quite vehement response of his friends. Most seemed incredibly put out at the concept of tweeting at conferences, describing it as being "rude" and as "changing the dynamic." I was dumbfounded. A few of us tried to push back in comments about the value of conference twittering but to no avail.
There is something in this.
Twitter has me making notes at conferences again. The only problem I have with keeping up with the speaker while doing it is the 140 character limit. I miss things when I try to figure out how to make a post fit the limit.
Posted by: Alan | July 13, 2009 at 11:51 PM
I agree that twitter at conference for me is a way to take notes. And the more people tweeting the better my notes are!
Posted by: Sarah | July 14, 2009 at 11:35 AM
TWO issues here: danah addressed searching for more info (keynote's papers, definitions, translations, Wikipedia, etc) more than the back channel conversations. So I think she made a strong case for dynamic searching for knowledge instead of letting the one channel roll over you. And there is a misunderstanding/digital divide for those who don't search/explore while listening.
But Twitter is tricky. As long as we don't yet have a social netiquette (or new etiquette is savaging keynote to show you're smarter as some of our colleagues now regularly do on conference back channels), and we use hashtags to talk behind keynotes back... community will be divided, no?
Posted by: Colleen | July 15, 2009 at 01:48 PM
I think thats a good point that danah is making two distinct arguments here - one about supporting listening by searching etc and another about Twitter backchannels. I keep trying to wrap my head around the back channel thing and understand more about the downsides of it I see the huge potential for snark and further dividing of the community but is there away around that given that the technology exists?
Posted by: Glenda Morgan | July 24, 2009 at 02:47 PM