People who pay lots of money (or their employer's money) to fly to a conference and then sit in the sessions tweeting or surfing the web as though it were a slow day at the office are ultimately just impoverishing their own mind (like the people who don't have the patience to read books or who hate movies that don't do all the thinking for them).
They are only dimly aware of what's going on around them and shut out stimuli which they judge to be "boring" or "irrelevant to me" in favor of their familiar, unchallenging stimuli. It should be embarrassing, but somehow it's socially acceptable to be the equivalent of the guy who shows up to conference without doing the reading because he was playing WoW all night.
I went to RailsConf with a coworker like this and although I like her personally, she spent one of the more interesting sessions reading web comics and remarked "Wow, that was boring" afterwards. Well, yeah, you tuned out in the first 3 minutes.
Having live-tweeted the entirety of BackboneConf, I would like to object to a premise of your comment and the original post.
Live-tweeting well is hard. It is not simply tuning out, or not focusing on the presentation. It's actually exactly the opposite. You have to listen intently and synthesize what a speaker is saying into succinct statements. Having done this 8 hrs a day for two days, I can tell you that it's about as mentally taxing a task as one can engage in (and i'm not saying that because i have a stake in whether live tweeting succeeds or not. I'm saying it because i wanted to find out how difficult it was to live-tweet an event, and I thought BackboneConf was a worthwhile event to disseminate to a wider audience).
I assume it is being down voted because it is off topic. ...tweeting or surfing the web as though it were a slow day at the office (what the parent is talking about) is a very different thing from live-tweeting an event (what the article is talking about).
Am I the only one who doesn't see any problem with this at all?
I mean, it's not like attendees are talking into a phone, inconveniencing other people. Complaining that every attendee's attention is not permanently fixed upon you strikes me as particularly vain. What about taking notes on a laptop? What about scribbling into a notebook? You should be glad that someone's interested enough to repeat the things you're saying to others.
Backchannel tweeting to me sounds like an excellent solution to the whispered conversation. Now you don't need to be physically proximate to someone in order to discuss ideas raised during the presentation. Not only that, but you're not going to disturb other attendees doing it! Thanks to this tech, people can add richness to the presentation they are attending.
This leads into the future. What happens when we have implants that allow us to communicate without tapping on a device at all, but rather just by thinking? How are you going to even know who's fully fixated upon you, and not engaged in backchannel conversation? And would you still be offended?
Always remember: Presentations are not for you; they are for your audience.
> Complaining that every attendee's attention is not
> permanently fixed upon you strikes me as particularly vain.
I read this differently: an audience can get the most out of a presentation by paying attention.
If you're consciously communicating while attending a presentation, you're probably not getting anything out of what's being immediately said. In an information-dense presentation, that means you're not getting the most out of the presentation: unfortunate at best, and making the rest of the presentation hard to understand at worst.
Perhaps it's more useful read as an "attendee tip" than a "presenter request?"
If you have a problem with people looking into their phones and away from you, there's one simple thing you can do to fix the problem - be more interesting.
No really, it works.
I love backchannel tweeting because of two things:
1. I gave people something to talk about, yay. Later on I will join in and get to see all the comments, wonderful!
2. Too many people starting to look down? Quick! Pepper the talk with something interesting, move to the next slide, the next topic, whatever. You are not being entertaining and if you are not entertaining nobody will get anything out of your talk (because they won't pay attention)!
I keep getting invited to talk at barcamps and stuff, so I must be doing something right.
Well, yes, if you are there for your own sake, live-tweeting the goings-on is taking away from the experience. But if you are there for your followers' sakes--that is, if you are a journalist--then live-tweeting is the whole point of attending: you are serving as a proxy, telling them what's going on so they can experience the session "live", vicariously, through you. Journalists have never really paid much attention to speeches; before Twitter, though, it was because they were transcribing everything down on paper to analyze it later. Twitter just puts that transcription on the internet.
In the modern era, at least, it's not strictly true that journalists were busy transcribing speeches; it's standard practice for a person giving a speech (especially in politics) to give copies of the speech text to the press, usually before the speech itself. Typically it's provided under an embargo (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embargo_%28journalism%29), so the reporters can't actually report on it until the speech is over, but the extra lead time lets them start working on their stories early.
That's how you can see talking heads on CNN saying "we're told the President will talk a lot about taxes tonight," say, in the run-up to the State of the Union address -- they've gotten a copy of the speech from the White House, under an embargo. So they can't print the text of the speech right then, but they can allude generally to its contents.
I think that's just as harmful. The 24-second news cycle creates an unending stream of fake controversies, corrections, retractions, and flamewars stemming from the rush to publish. As a reader, I'd prefer if journalists took notes, thought about the entire presentation, perhaps asked for clarification when necessary, and then published.
You seem like you know what you're talking about. Why do you think the average live-blogger uses something like Twitter over a video app like Color? It'd take just as long to sit through a live-blogged session as it would to just watch an audience video of the same event.
I'm not sure your question makes sense. People following an event over Twitter can easily multi-task; they can just scan every few minutes or less frequently as desired. Following the same event with video requires lots more bandwidth (more awkward when mobile), attention, noise (or headphones), screen real estate, etc. Unless you're extremely interested in the event, watching live video is usually a big waste of time.
People should concentrate more on experiencing and less on reporting. Live-tweeting during conferences, taking pictures at concerts, checking in to happenings etc. I feel that people do those just to show of how nice their life is, instead of actually living it.
I couldn't agree more. The last concert I went to, I felt like far too many people were viewing the concert through their 3.5" screen than looking at the 90' stage in front of them.
I can't help but feel that these people will someday look back and have great pictures of these events but no memory of them.
I can't help but feel that these people will someday look back and have great pictures of these events but no memory of them.
Not necessarily. I am going to a lot of concerts (~3-4 per month), and I take pictures with my phone because of my horrible memory.
If stumble upon the photo a few months later, it triggers most of my memories and experiences, but without this sort of "evidence" I'd be totally lost on the details from that evening.
edit: And, after all, wasn't that kind of the original purpose for a photograph? To capture an awesome moment you want to memorize?
Hm, I am split on that. I rarely tweet during talks, but I love the immediate backchannel. I usually forget about some points of the talk or I cannot find someone to talk to afterwards and the backchannel helps with that.
I learned that by force: on RubyKaigi 2009, there were IRC screens right next to the slides - mostly for translating the talks between english and japanese and vice versa, but also for commenting and all kinds of fun. So, depending on your language, you had to consume the IRC channel if you wanted to follow the talk. You could even read what was going on in another room. I enjoyed it a lot.
As a speaker, I am okay with it: I always spoke in front of tweeting crowds :).
As someone who is not remotely as comfortable in a presentation setting in front of a crowd of people as I am one-on-one, one of my biggest issues is a lack of attention. It's pretty easy to see who isn't giving their full attention, and I end up immediately thinking about that instead of the actual presentation. I end up looking for someone who is paying attention and just start presenting to that individual to ease my way through it. And I'm at most working with ~30 people.
Can't imagine having to put up with it on a much larger scale and severity.
I did a presentation a few weeks ago and I found that it was awesome as a presenter to know what people think, and how they perceived my talk : I looked at hashtag after the talk.
I'm a total noobs at talking in public but that was very useful for me. It also made very easy to talk with people who expressed their interest or disinterest.
I've always thought that live tweeting during conferences was incredibly lame and obnoxious, both as a presenter and an attendee. Rarely do people add value with their live tweets. And when I do want to find something of value at a conference by looking at the tweets, I have to sort through all sorts of crap where people just repeat what the speaker said.
As someone who loves to see what is going on but is never within two thousand miles of where these conferences are held, I love the live tweeting and live blogging.
I get that it may be an annoyance to those who attend, but to the thousands (millions?) who can't attend, it's how we follow as best we can.
Readit News
They are only dimly aware of what's going on around them and shut out stimuli which they judge to be "boring" or "irrelevant to me" in favor of their familiar, unchallenging stimuli. It should be embarrassing, but somehow it's socially acceptable to be the equivalent of the guy who shows up to conference without doing the reading because he was playing WoW all night.
I went to RailsConf with a coworker like this and although I like her personally, she spent one of the more interesting sessions reading web comics and remarked "Wow, that was boring" afterwards. Well, yeah, you tuned out in the first 3 minutes.
Live-tweeting well is hard. It is not simply tuning out, or not focusing on the presentation. It's actually exactly the opposite. You have to listen intently and synthesize what a speaker is saying into succinct statements. Having done this 8 hrs a day for two days, I can tell you that it's about as mentally taxing a task as one can engage in (and i'm not saying that because i have a stake in whether live tweeting succeeds or not. I'm saying it because i wanted to find out how difficult it was to live-tweet an event, and I thought BackboneConf was a worthwhile event to disseminate to a wider audience).
I mean, it's not like attendees are talking into a phone, inconveniencing other people. Complaining that every attendee's attention is not permanently fixed upon you strikes me as particularly vain. What about taking notes on a laptop? What about scribbling into a notebook? You should be glad that someone's interested enough to repeat the things you're saying to others.
Backchannel tweeting to me sounds like an excellent solution to the whispered conversation. Now you don't need to be physically proximate to someone in order to discuss ideas raised during the presentation. Not only that, but you're not going to disturb other attendees doing it! Thanks to this tech, people can add richness to the presentation they are attending.
This leads into the future. What happens when we have implants that allow us to communicate without tapping on a device at all, but rather just by thinking? How are you going to even know who's fully fixated upon you, and not engaged in backchannel conversation? And would you still be offended?
Always remember: Presentations are not for you; they are for your audience.
I read this differently: an audience can get the most out of a presentation by paying attention.
If you're consciously communicating while attending a presentation, you're probably not getting anything out of what's being immediately said. In an information-dense presentation, that means you're not getting the most out of the presentation: unfortunate at best, and making the rest of the presentation hard to understand at worst.
Perhaps it's more useful read as an "attendee tip" than a "presenter request?"
No really, it works.
I love backchannel tweeting because of two things:
1. I gave people something to talk about, yay. Later on I will join in and get to see all the comments, wonderful!
2. Too many people starting to look down? Quick! Pepper the talk with something interesting, move to the next slide, the next topic, whatever. You are not being entertaining and if you are not entertaining nobody will get anything out of your talk (because they won't pay attention)!
I keep getting invited to talk at barcamps and stuff, so I must be doing something right.
That's how you can see talking heads on CNN saying "we're told the President will talk a lot about taxes tonight," say, in the run-up to the State of the Union address -- they've gotten a copy of the speech from the White House, under an embargo. So they can't print the text of the speech right then, but they can allude generally to its contents.
I can't help but feel that these people will someday look back and have great pictures of these events but no memory of them.
Not necessarily. I am going to a lot of concerts (~3-4 per month), and I take pictures with my phone because of my horrible memory.
If stumble upon the photo a few months later, it triggers most of my memories and experiences, but without this sort of "evidence" I'd be totally lost on the details from that evening.
edit: And, after all, wasn't that kind of the original purpose for a photograph? To capture an awesome moment you want to memorize?
Their phone is their memory of it. We are outsourcing part of our brain to our devices. This is lamentable, but probably inevitable.
I learned that by force: on RubyKaigi 2009, there were IRC screens right next to the slides - mostly for translating the talks between english and japanese and vice versa, but also for commenting and all kinds of fun. So, depending on your language, you had to consume the IRC channel if you wanted to follow the talk. You could even read what was going on in another room. I enjoyed it a lot.
As a speaker, I am okay with it: I always spoke in front of tweeting crowds :).
Can't imagine having to put up with it on a much larger scale and severity.
I'm a total noobs at talking in public but that was very useful for me. It also made very easy to talk with people who expressed their interest or disinterest.
I get that it may be an annoyance to those who attend, but to the thousands (millions?) who can't attend, it's how we follow as best we can.