A Twitter backchannel caused quite the stir at the Web 2.0 Expo this week in New York. As Danah Boyd, social media researcher at Microsoft Research New England, spoke about “Streams of Content, Limited Attention: The Flow of Information through Social Media,” the crowd tweeted their critiques of her talk. Many complained that she spoke too quickly and read her speech, as opposed to connecting with the crowd. Others quipped about dating Boyd. The audience chuckled as these tweets appeared. Only Boyd wasn’t in on the joke. She had her back to the screen and couldn’t receive the feedback needed to tweak her presentation.
Ironically, she talked about curating content and said, “We need technological innovations…tools that allow people to slice and dice content so as to not reach information overload. This is not simply about aggregating or curating content to create personalized destination sites. Frankly, I don’t think this will work.” I wonder if she might feel that curating the content behind her would have worked.
The next day, the staff apologized for their handling of the Twitter disruption and said they would experiment with curating feeds going forward. Although, I felt badly for Boyd, I have to admit that a big part of me was disappointed. I wanted the real deal, not the CNN-like version of Twitter commenting. Then again, that was selfish. No speaker should be mocked during a presentation. Unless it’s done in light fun?
I ran into master Twitterer Chris Brogan the next day and asked him what he thought about the situation. He didn’t believe in curation of any kind. He thought that Boyd’s fast-paced speech was the main issue, not the live feed.
A Facebook friend Pinny Gniwisch added, “What happened to Boyd was sad and to a point mean, however Orielly is known to have the best speakers. If someone reaches that keynote level, they have to know they need to bring their A game and nothing less will do.”
Other speakers like Baratunde Thurston, who rocked his keynote about Hashtags, disagreed. “You can’t have a divided experience where the speaker is in one world and the audience is in another. But the larger point is that people have come to think there is an intrinsic right to heckling. What happened to actually listening to the speaker at a conference? In this new age where everyone demands to be heard, I fear that we are losing respect for the art of listening.” Easy for him to say. Baratunde is a hysterically smart comedian and commentator; it’s impossible not listen to him.
As a multi-tasking nation, the thought of sitting still and watching one person speak at a podium without checking an iPhone or tweeting a thought can be maddening. Anton Mannering, who recently produced the Audience Conference, ignores this point and refuses to add a Twitter backchannel to his events. He even goes as far as banning Internet usage during some of his events.
“Are attendees paying proper attention to the speaker, or are they busy monitoring the backchannel? Having laptops open for this is rude, and using them to target speakers is abusive. If event organizers allow this to happen, speakers will stop coming. Or speakers will change their message to a populist one, which is no good to anyone,” he says.
Many techsters remember the Sarah Lacy interview fiasco with Mark Zuckerberg at SXSW in 2008. The audience panned the BusinessWeek reporter’s interview style, claiming she didn’t control the interview or ask the right questions. Granted the interview was known as one of the worst conference moments, but I wonder if it was necessary to add fuel to the fire with a live, displayed feed.
Is it time to start curating stream comments at conferences? Or would you pull the censorship card? Event organizers might decide to challenge the crowd’s ADD and get them focusing by disabling Web
access all together.
Or maybe speakers should have teleprompters facing them with comments so that they can get in on the discussion. Of course, that might throw off their concentration, impair their talk and evoke more online cruelty. It’s not easy being public in a social media world!
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Ylod Sean
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I can understand the articles, but the navigation doesn't work so good.health
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It's one of these fancy things one might say that these days is a must at events like that , but I think it just distracts the audience and can be heavily misused. We should get back to the old-school conferences known from before the web 2.0 era.
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Can i know more aboutDISQUS?
Thanks,
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Colon Cleanse
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- Kaitlin Pike
Community Manager
Web 2.0 Expo
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I don't go to a concert to hear the off-key version of Handel's Messiah from my seat mate and I don't go to presentations to hear comments on the speaker's looks. Why are we at the presentation if not to learn something? If we don't agree, we can ask a question or comment at the appropriate time.
The fact that the backchannel was projected behind the speaker and she had no way to know what was going on was outrageous. If the intention of the backchannel was to improve her presentation, then it would have made sense to have her see it too. Really! Put yourself in her shoes. Her experiences sounds like something that happens in grade school when everyone is whispering behind your back and you don't know why.
I was recently at Pubcon in Las Vegas. As a teacher of business presentation skills, I noticed that many of the presentations fell far short of ideal - too fast, too general, too much silliness - but still, I learned a lot, even from some of those same presentations.
Are we so smart that we have nothing to learn, even sometimes from someone who's speaking isn't quite perfect on that particular day? Are we so childish that we feel it's okay to publicly humiliate someone? Sounds like something Chairman Mao would have enjoyed during China's cultural revolution.
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keep it going plzz
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I must be turning curmudgeonly. The line between vox populi and cacophony is becoming hard to find in the social media world.
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I do speak on a regular basis and I think a MUCH better way to handle this is to set aside a distinct portion of the presenting time (if possible) for dealing with audience discussion and feedback this way. If you are given 45 minutes and you know people will be tweeting about the topic speak for 35 minutes and then pull up the twitter stream and deal with the Q&A/Comments then.
@patrickallmond
(And yes I have tweeted during a speech. However I'd be surprised if I ever do it again. Because I don't want it done to me.)
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Thank you for pushing this debate. It is so necessary for this dynamic of live presenters to continue to thrive, be its best, and be relevant.
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Most speakers need to get into "the zone" to give a great talk -- a kind of flow experience. Reading live tweets while speaking may be possible for some, but most speakers have enough of a challenge trying to keep up with the ever-increasing expectations of audiences.
Every speaker has a unique style, and some may prefer to have an open, and visible, backchannel. But I am sure in such cases they will want to access that channel as a way to interact with their audience, as opposed to "behind-the-back snark." I have seen a live-tweet wall work pretty well in panel discussions, for example, precisely because the members of the panel who are not speaking can monitor the stream.
My own practice (unless I am on a panel) is to wait until after I am done speaking and then go check the tweetstream for insights that can help me become a better speaker. I highly recommend this practice.
Some might say we need a "Miss Manners" for social media, to help us understand the rules and etiquette for the online world. I disagree. This stuff is too new. Social norms can't be dictated; they need to sort themselves out over time. Once we figure out what Twitter really is (we haven't yet) and have had some time to let it sink in, then we can decide what's polite and what isn't. I would much rather we sift through these things gradually and come to consensus through conversation
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If you're as accomplished a performer and communicator as Baratunde, and as adept at dealing with audience interaction, participation and heckling as he is, then I'm sure it's easier to be multi-channel. Apparently Jonathan Ames was pretty unbelievable as a moderator at the PEN World Voices Festival earlier this year. By and large, however, I'm yet to see at most (even tech or social media) events I go to either a comprehensive strategy, or an adequate format for involving even in-the-room commenters effectively, let alone IRC backchannel snark, Twitter dissection or latterly social TV discussion on conference webstreams. I'd love to see a list of great formats that encourage a more dynamic relationship between presenter or moderator/panel and audience/attendees - is there such a list?
Maybe you need to be someone like Andrew Schneider (http://en.oreilly.com/et2009/public/schedule/de...) or Marcel.li Antunez (http://www.marceliantunez.com/tikiwiki/tiki-ind...) to deal with it effectively...
For those interested in the actual substance of what danah boyd had to say, here it is:
http://www.danah.org/papers/talks/Web2Expo.html
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Having said that: I agree with Darcy, it all this lies on respect: Respect for your decision of paying to listen to someone you "thought" might provide new information to something, respect for your fellow audience members who in turn paid for the same chance and finally respect for the human on stage who regardless of the benefits she might perceive by keynoting (e.g $, whuffie, etc) has decided to share her knowledge.
off note question: why didn't someone raised her hand and told her what was happening behind her "back" or at least complain about her speed? when did the crowd became a mob?
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As someone who attended Danah Boyd's talk at the Web 2.0 Expo, one of the things that I noticed as soon as I fell into tracking the twitterwall instead of Boyd wasn't just the disconnect from the content she was delivering but a disconnection from my fellow audience members. All at once we became a bunch of commentators versus non-commentators versus quippers versus the outraged versus the baffled versus the annoyed versus the distracted versus the delighted circling snarkers, etc.
When Aristotle recorded his thoughts on Rhetoric (meaning specifically spoken rhetoric) 2300+ years ago he knew what we would lose now if we let everyone speak at once and that is a sense of audience, this is a single group hearing and seeing another person deliver opinion/insight/wisdom for later consideration and discourse.
The whole reason any of us feel the same need as Aristotle's Greek brothers and sisters to gather physically in a specified place and time even though we live in an era of constant digital information exchange is that we need to see and hear *together* the ideas of another.
As audience members, when others around us listen, laugh, nod, take notes, shake their heads, or clap we pick up a wealth of signals about the larger validity, context, and acceptance of the content and delivery. The crowd may be wrong, but we will at least know how it responds when everyone is in a more or less level playing field (there are no cross browser, connectivity, or other factors to mediate our interaction with a live presenter).
My final slippery thought: A twitterwall/backchannel may promise a new kind of unity for audience members, but it instead unites us on the basis of the separation (unique twitter ids, etc) that we came to the conference to set aside for a few hours. Instead of conferring we merely assemble. Instead of listening we wait to speak. Instead of watching the speaker we watch for our comment.
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Rude is rude. Don't give people a vehicle to amplify that in the future. I have seen too many instances where people pile on, and actually start making comments to turn the attention onto themselves, rather than to improve the experience for all.
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Ilana
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But the backchannel as a backdrop isn't all that pleasant, even when things are going positively.
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Anonymity exacerbates the problem but even when the comments are attached to Twitter profiles, it is clear people revert to unproductive attacks. It is also not clear that when an audience has constructive points that it helps the speaker.
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There is, however, a model for movies that DOES let the audience "have a voice" in realtime -- it is Roger Ebert's Cinema Interruptus, where he is in the theater with a remote control DVD, and at any time the audience can yell out STOP! and he stops to let them make their point (which he may or may not comment on, and which often includes a brief discussion among other participants). While this is both wildly entertaining and often very informative... it takes FOUR NIGHTS to complete one film! By the last night, even Ebert has begun telling people to STFU.
But even with Cinema Interruptus, the FIRST night is devoted to showing the film start to finish with no interruptions. In other words, the live audience participation does not begin until the following night, *after* everyone has first experienced it exactly as the developer/filmmaker intended. The idea is, you do not have to *like* this film, but you do have to pay attention to it BEFORE voicing your opinions.
Granted, one argument in favor of the displayed backchannel is that it can help improve the presentation in realtime. I have to ask if anyone who actually believes that has ever given a keynote presentation. We bring people to speak at tech (emphasis on TECH) conferences because they have some insight or experience they're brave enough to share, not because they are professional performers skilled in making sweeping ad-hoc adjustments. If the only people allowed to give presentations at tech events are those with the performance experience and talent to actually shift their keynote in realtime based on processing audience feedback, the pool of possible presenters drops to, oh, a half-dozen.
Personally, I'll never speak at an event with a *displayed* backchannel unless it's an extremely small audience and the display/discussion is part of the talk itself. Having a backchannel is great. Displaying it... or even expecting the speaker to be following it, well, I'll never be that good. It takes every neuron I have just to keep the stage fright from overwhelming my ability to form reasonably functional sentences. On a really good day, I can (if the physics of the stage lighting permits) adjust to feedback from the audience the "old skool" way -- if I can see they're not paying attention (by watching body language), I can try to adjust tempo or make a small shift.
I'm all for backchannel discussions, but have seen not a shred of scientific evidence that it's possible to fully engage with the content while *also* typing, reading, processing continuous backchannel commentary. The best use of a public, live backchannel would be *after* the presentation is complete, in follow-up viewings/discussions.
I'd much rather see something like "Keynote Interruptus" at a conference, where everyone first watches the keynote, and THEN can go into a second viewing experience of the video of it, where at any time someone can yell STOP and discuss it, and the backchannel can fully participate.
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These are just some really awesome points, Kathy. Ilana, Khayyam and I talked at length about this situation in the green room at Javits after my own keynote, and I focused on the same point you raised: backchannel = ok; displaying it only for audience = bad; displaying it for both audience and speaker = slightly better but still problematic..
Jeremiah Owyang has written about integrating twitter backchannels into panels, a decidedly different environment from keynotes, but still relevant and worth a read. http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2008/04/24/l...
In terms of positive experiences with speakers integrating feedback from a simultaneous backchannel, I've had one such experience. Again, it wasn't a keynote speech, so the context is important. I was interviewing White House advisor Valerie Jarrett at Netroots Nation. Most of the questions had been submitted in advance via blogs, facebook and twitter. However, we also accepted live questions from people in the room or watching remotely online
The conference organizers had a team of people reading through the hashtag I'd set up, and they would display ONE question on the stage-facing monitor that I could see. After I asked that question (or ignored it for a sufficiently long amount of time) they would rotate in another question. That single purpose monitor could also be used to send me notes that might help the interview. They didn't use it for that purpose, but I can imagine lots of scenarios: e.g. "Dude, your fly is unzipped"
My larger point on all this comes from my experience as a standup comic. We have to deal with hecklers all the time, and a common response to hecklers is, "I'm up here with a microphone, and no one paid to come hear what you have to say."
By displaying a live backchannel visible ONLY to the audience the web 2.0 organizers helped turn a significant number of audience members into hecklers AND gave them microphones.
LOVE the idea of Keynote Interruptus and am happy to be a guinea pig for testing purposes. I'd love to give a talk then have it rewound and discussed with me in the room to answer questions or flesh out points. Most folks probably wouldn't be so comfortable looking at themselves on screen though :)
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Thanks for continuing the conversation. Keynote Interruptus sounds like a great idea. Esp. if someone can highlight the best tweets of the night! Of course, those will be the kinder comments.
We'll have to follow up this blog with some of your new ideas for handling comments at conferences.
Ilana
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As a speaker, the problem I've seen with a lot of tech conferences is that many of the people presenting have no formal training in how to engage an audience. Many of them *sit down*, faces lit up by a laptop, and basically read their slides. Their slides, of course, have as many sentences as they can cram on them, or an unreadable graph/chart packed with too much information. This sucks all the energy out of the room faster than you can say "hashtag."
The solution isn't a backchannel. Rather, the solution is making sure the speakers have training in this area. Either the speaker has professional training, or the conference organizer appoints someone to give the speaker a quick lesson (don't sit down; use the remote; don't look at your laptop; move around the room while speaking; slides should be bullet points or simple images, not whole paragraphs.)
It is the organizer's responsibility to properly vet the speakers. That means not only looking at technical prowess, but also speaking ability, past speeches, and training. And yes, as a conference organizer who has had to vet speakers before, I know this can be a challenge...but when done right, the conference is 100x better.
Screw the backchannel.
-Erica
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Anyone who has done even a minimal amount of public-speaking will tell you that if your speech is going to be any good, you need to focus your attention on your presentation & the audience - it is unfair to expect a speaker to simultaneously monitor a back-channel dialogue.
I'm all for people being able to tweet during speeches, but the backchannel should not be publicly displayed. Gives too much room for unnecessary & often ignorant commentary from people who wouldn't have the cojones to stand up and shout what they just tweeted. But if you put their words up on a screen behind the speaker, they might as well have done just that.
D.N.A
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That said, another speaker at w2E, Heather Gold, actually has done quite a bit of thinking about this issue. I am interested in some of the concepts in her google talk on "How to Tummel" http://bit.ly/xISwJ. (I haven't seen the web2.0Expo talk up yet). Intuitive but we don't always apply these ideas. She talks at length about how to present in engaging ways, using the give and take of attention... but also talks about the split-attention of the audience tweeting. She immediately asks the audience to close the laptop and says she will try to earn it and if they open the laptop she'll know she didn't. Later there's a conversation about tweeting. Also asks the audience to "not make fun of anyone" as an inversion of comedy--very interesting ideas.
Tricky issues with the backchannel because extending the community requires it. And one could argue the backchannel always was there, it just wasn't transparent. You can't stop it. And it seems like "old tech" for us to gather in lecture halls for one to many communication when we're all working on interconnected conversational models. How to balance? Very interesting discussion.
On another front--I read somewhere that the setup was not particularly good for integrating audience/sense of dead air in the room...was that true? I watched online so did not have any sense of how things felt inside the room itself.
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What I have to say to people who feel that they were justified in heckling her behind her back is, "What are you, two years old?"
That was a person standing up there whose nervousness was reflected in her delivery. You were disappointed. Do adult things to convey that at the appropriate time and way.
As for O'Reilly's move, whether it was the right "social media" thing to do or not is far overshadowed by the fact that it was the compassionate and human thing to do.
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Baratunde, right on about the comment on the art of listening. It is a lost art, isn't it?
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I like the idea of a live feedback loop for presenters, they should know what's going on behind their backs, so perhaps this could have been addressed via some kind of monitor. Better that, then filtering every single comment that comes in.
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As a speaker, you have a million things moving through your mind. Monitoring the back channel for the needle in the haystack shouldn't be one of them.
I don't think you can take the Twitter display away from the Southby crowd, we will just create something else. The audience wants to be connected and have a voice. The question that remains is whether or not all those voices are good for the speaker during their presentation.
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