Marc:

Back-channel thuggery is not even discourse, let alone journalism. Here's my response to the Danah Boyd incident:

http://dave.amplify.com/2009/11/18/when-crowds-go-wild/

The problem is not with feedback on how a presentation is given - the problem is when the method of feedback becomes the equivalent of standing up in the crowd and competing with the speaker to express your "wit." Once the twitter feed can directly interfere with the speaker's presentation, there is no difference in either the intent or the outcome of efforts that directly defeat the presentation. Those who posted knowing their posts would be publicly presented not only defeated the speaker and any idea of their own capacity for polite discourse, they interfered with other audience members attempting to listen and learn from the presentations. In addition, the nature of electronic communication in real-time encourages mob mentality and impolite expression which degrade the value of feedback from reasoned and helpful discourse into the equivalent of throwing electronic tomatoes. Unpleasant, degrading to both speaker and twitterer, and ultimately working directly to destroy the value of the conference.

It's all fun and games until someone gets caught. It's a bit like students who are making rude remarks to each other during a lecture - or even worse, during another student's presentation. In most cases, the students won't apologize or admit they were doing anything wrong.

This can easily backfire, since the heckled speakers can obtain the public feeds.

+1 cbrownseyed. Some twecklers get caught up in the moment and forget that their comments might live forever in a Google cache.

Additional data, from http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=tweckle

tweckle

conjugation of "Twitter" + "heckle", v. : to abuse a speaker or performer via Twitter followers in the audience whilst s/he is speaking/performing

usage example: Hey, @bobsomeone, let's tweckle the keynote guy on stage and get all our friends to walk out of his Powerpoint right NOW!

related words:
twekle heckle hatin' give love

entry posted by jwoolson on Oct 6, 2009

The fact that you used the word made up word "tweckle" caused me to stop reading immediately. Guh.

"In short: if there are any guts left in us, why not get up and blast away publically? Or are we experts only in preaching honorable conduct, ethics, and morals, but practice nothing but not even exceedingly witty twitting grunts?"

And what, exactly isn't public about Twitter? It's searchable, it's open, heck we use hashtags to more quickly find related tweets. This shows an ignorance to what Twitter is and is about.

I don't see this becoming a fad, anymore than someone standing up in the audience and heckling directly. A tweet is not only public but permanent.

One response might be, "Oh, let's ban tweeting at this conference so people don't get heckled." Another response might be "Let's have someone in charge of watching the conference hashtag to respond to concerns as they arise."

Which one shows more respect for attendees?

To @billso and @cbrownsyed: Do you guys really think that people on Twitter DON'T understand that what they say is public and that people can :::gasp::: see it and search it? Heck, what do you think a hashtag is for?

bekka_alice, how does a twitter feed interfere with those who wish to listen to the speaker? If you want to listen to the speaker, keep your attention on the speaker and not the device in front of you, or even simply do not open your device to that feed. The reports I have read suggest that what was happening in cyberspace did not in any way actually spill into the physical room during the presentation.

I'm amazed that some people think that before twitter, no one ever chatted openly about how bad a particular presentation was. Of course we did, although typically after the session was over, and typically didn't leave a "paper" trail of our comments except perhaps in the conference eval forms.

We wouldn't consider this acceptable behavior on the part of our students; why is it acceptable behavior on our part? Yes, it costs time and money to attend a conference. It also costs time and money to attend college. I've never yet seen a conference presentation that wasn't followed by a Q&A -- I've even heard some keynote addresses that included Q&A time at the end. That is the appropriate time, place, and format for comments. What seems to be going on with the Tweeters is nothing short of juvenile conduct.

This is nothing new. I recall in grammar school 40 years ago, students quietly heckling another student presentation going on or the teacher, just loud enough to get a giggle, and quiet enough so teacher could not figure out who was doing it. Apply technology, add the need to let off some steam to feel better about oneself in a tough world situation, and voila! Tweckling! Childish? Absolutely. But no different than a conference 5 years ago where the entire audience played "Bingo", except for the technology.

Since when did the conference become about the speaker and not the attendee? Doesn't the attendee pay to attend? Doesn't the attendee have a right to expect the best for their registration dollar? Shaming the attendee for calling out a speaker is backwards. Blaming the audience for speaking up because a speaker did not meet their needs is "me, me, me" thinking: presenter first, audience will sit quietly and listen.

Come on. It's not about the speaker and that speaker should be racked over the coals for delivering poor content. Actually, the audience should have walked out on that speaker. I would have.

Yeah, what if students and parents held teachers accountable for relevant, timely and current information? What if attendees held conference organizers and speakers to a new standard. Wow, what a concept. People who felt it was inappropriate believe that a speaker can deliver what ever they want, people will sit quietly, passively in their chairs, letting their minds drift off. And people will continue to pay to attned.

Wake up. The power is in the attendee's hand where it belongs. Power to the attenedee. (BTW, had the speaker delivered some great content with awesome slides, this would never have happened!)

It all goes back to know your audience. Use the channel. Embrace it. Presentations are no longer one sided, nor should they be. Learning isnt.

@jesskry

High or low, we have to consider new technologies in teaching professional communication.

Right. The attendees are in charge, and it's all about them.

This is unbelievable. The same cretins who defend this rude, graceless, brain-dead behavior are the dorks who just can't turn off their noise-makers in class, in theatres, at funerals, and at other venues where interruptions are inappropriate.

I'd like to see (and hear) every single defender of this barbarous behavior have to deliver a public address to an audience made up of lowlifes like themselves. For an hour each. The only way to correct the attitudes of boors like these is to give them a serious dose of their own, ah, medicine.

How long before someone has had enough of this and responds to tweckling with real violence? The Second Amendment kind.

@karlynm - I'm sure some users realize they are heckling in a public space - and a few users probably revel in their fleeting power.

But I'm also sure that other users are caught up in the moment and forget that Twitter is archived. We see similar behavior with e-mail, forums, and other media.

@jesskry and @laoshi both have good points. The one-sided presentation is a lumbering dinosaur. Presenters and their audiences need better training and more positive attitudes.

"I'd like to see (and hear) every single defender of this barbarous behavior have to deliver a public address to an audience made up of lowlifes like themselves."

Most of us HAVE. I HAVE. @karlynm HAS. @fienen HAS. Hell, the guy who opened with "hella dropshadow" is Matt Herzberger, who's given multiple presentations at HighEdWeb as well as at Stamats.

Yes, these "lowlifes" are the same people who dare stand in front of the same crowd knowing they could be torn to shreds too. You know why they're not? Because they come to the talk READY. They KNOW THE AUDIENCE. They ENGAGE AS CONVERSATION AND NOT AS LECTURE.

And seriously, "Second Amendment?" WTF? These are higher ed web developers we're talking about here. This isn't a bunch of loony fringe people arguing over whether Obama is a Socialist or a Communist.

The notion that the audience has the right to behave like this is eight-year-old morality, and not a particularly bright eight-year-old at that. I suspect it's a function of our delusion that we must be entertained every moment of our lives, and if the moment fails to deliver up to our high standards of timeliness, relevance, and--face it--entertainment, we can just pick up the remote and change the channel. Never mind that it's a live presenter, not a television.

It would be interesting to see one of these lowlifes, and I choose the term carefully, when the presentation is not going so well. Sure, lots of us--myself included--have given public presentations. Most of us, however, in this and the most recent century, have come to believe that the days are past when the audience is entitled to bring rotten eggs and vegetables to throw at the stage when things don't go well. Some people just haven't gotten the message: adulthood brings responsibilities, including self-control.

Our masters have been hitting the ludi et panem formula so hard that we've come to feel entitled to complain when the game's not up to our standards, regardless of the venue. This just means people are suckers enough to buy into the delusion.

"Higher ed web developers"! My, oh, my! How dare one criticize the behavior of some members of such a priesthood? Please forgive my temerity in suggesting that the presenter, however far he may have fallen below your expectations, is as human as you are, maybe more so. A higher ed web developer is an expert of a sort, i.e., "a damn fool with a briefcase and a collection of jargon, five miles from home." And btw, being an expert at something or other doesn't immunize one from being a member of a loony fringe, of whatever political stripe.

Nobody in their right mind would suggest publicly executing twecklers for their behavior. But when and if someone snaps under the strain of the mob-mentality humiliation that some ill-bred clods are trying to defend, don't profess to be shocked, shocked. What people forget is the simple truth that we have to get along, and civility--however unnatural it may feel to the first-time practioner--is what keeps us from tearing each other to pieces.

Some of the least dynamic speakers may even have something of value to say if you listen. Value isn't always immediately discernable. Sometimes one has to think about what's been said to find it. Learning can also take place in uncomfortable circumstances, such as when one listens to a lecturer. And if the lecturer truly gives an execrable performance does mass rudeness improve on that or does it just feed the need for self gratification?

I was actually at the conference in Milwaukee... in the room when this incident occured. I was also at the conference the previous few days - where everyone was also live-tweeting every single session. 99% of the tweets from that conference were extremely positive -- 99% of the sessions were absolutely fantastic - with speakers who were knowledgeable about their topic and prepared to speak. The previous days speaker was not a tech person ... and yet his presentation was timely, useful and well-received. His presentation was live-tweeted by most in the room as well.

It wasn't until the next day when the entire group was forced to listen to a speaker who was so out of lunch, that the unrest began. A paid speaker arrived at a technology conference. A conference with 400+ people who build web applications and sites for a living .... and he does a presentation that was, at best, written 5 years ago.

I challenge any of you - sitting in a ballroom with 400 people - to actually stand up and say something when someone is giving a formal presentation. It wasn't a Q&A type session. It wasn't a dialogue. So ... everyone ended up turning to twitter. We'd been twittering everything else at the conference ... why not see what everyone else thought about the light yellow text with a drop shadow on a white background? And thus it began.

Some took it too far -- obviously. But overall ... people were just frustrated -- and they felt disrespected by the speaker, who had obviously made no preparation for his presentation whatsoever. If he couldn't take the time to prepare a presentation with up to date information about what he was talking about ... then we could take the time to twitter about his "interesting" recommendation for using phone calls or ICQ as the primary way to contact college students in 2009.

Several attendees of the conference wrote about this ...

This post provides a detailed analysis of the tweets by time ... showing that the audience waited 15 minutes into the presentation before going over the edge with sarcasm on their tweets:
http://futureendeavour.blogspot.com/2009/10/highedweb-great-keynote-revolt-of-2009.html

Another post from an attendee:
http://doteduguru.com/id3712-the-great-keynote-meltdown-of-2009.html

Another post with a comments about some of the sessions -- and ending with a note about how important it is for the speaker to KNOW HIS AUDIENCE.
http://wcs.wayne.edu/blog/2009/10/09/highedweb-2009-wrap-up/

All in all ... this was a situation of a speaker not respecting his audience enough to do some prep work and actually know what he was talking about by being in touch with the state of college communications ... and therefore completely losing the respect of his audience. Twitter just happened to be the method by which the message got out... instead of everyone "standing around the water cooler" talking about it.

"It would be interesting to see one of these lowlifes, and I choose the term carefully"

It would be interesting to hear you respond to the issues rather than trolling. But since you sound like you're trolling and rely on strawmen and reducto ad Hitlerum logic (see, I can play the Latin game there too) I'm just going to write you off as a Fark addict trapped in an academic's body. Have a nice day.

I'm with @jeffhurt - some the responses here represent exactly what is wrong in our industry. Why shouldn't those of us *paying* for a conference, a degree, whatever, not be upset when the experience is subpar. Being a professor, a keynote speaker or anyone who educates does not provide an automatic excuse to be lazy and irrelevant. Quite the opposite. It should obligate you to be on top of your field, well-researched, and at least away of your audience.

I'm a web developer in Higher Ed, but I have a Communication degree. I know how to give presentations and win a group people over. First rule of public speaking: KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE.

The troll on this thread (ahem dank48) makes the point that we are all juvenile for speaking up when our time and resources are wasted. This "get off my lawn" mentality is what holds back improvement.

Perhaps the fact that upset voices can be heard is a good thing. Perhaps there will be quality put back into the presentations we give, courses we teach and material we produce. That's the only place I can see it headed.

@billso I don't think it was a case of most users knowing that that this was public. All of us know the consquences of each tweet we post. As @wnalyd mentioned, good number of attendees that attended the conference are THE experts on social media and web in higher education. After all, the High Ed Web Association (who runs this conference) is the professional association for higher education web professionals.

If Mr. Galper had bothered to read the conference website, he would have known this. One of the few suggestions he had for us, was offering students videos of sexual acts as a reward for joining a group on facebook. In all honestly, this presentation worse than just a presentation from 2003.

The Twitter stream from #heweb09 was more than just a place for people to rant. One such example, there was an announcement made through twitter that an attendee's laptop was stolen early in the conference. One of the other attendee's posted a link to a paypal donation page to replace the stolen notebook. By the end of the conference, enough money was raised that we were able to purchase a new laptop for her. I think its sad that this kind of thing is overshadowed by the fact we had a crappy speaker.

In all honestly, how is posting a critical comment in a twitter back channel any different then heckling each in an article/blog post on The Chronicle. It's all the same to me. The writer of the article obviously spent more time doing research than Mr. Galper spent on his PowerPoint.

I honestly don't know which is more appalling: the fact that these e-lynchings occurred or the fact that people are defending such behavior. One realizes that the field is, how to put it politely, not one that appeals exclusively to the socially skilled. Still, even the most socially-challenged have probably heard of courtesy, manners, civility, and all that. God knows I've sat through presentations of various kinds, hi-tech and low, that were (it seemed to me) excruciatingly bad, for whatever reason. I certainly am in no position to evaluate the presentations in question.

The notion that the audience--any audience--has the right to behave like a herd of predators that have just sensed weakness in the alpha male is simply too "Lord of the Flies." Part of growing up is, well, learning to act like an adult. That is, there is more to life than throwing tantrums every time one feels inadequately served by whoever is doing the serving. It doesn't take a genius, even a web-developing genius, to grasp the simple fact that not everything that comes our way in the course of our day, or our lives, is going to be as good as we'd like it to be.

It does strike me, though, that the mobbing-rationalizers seem to have one thing in common. There's a strong whiff of the "I don't suffer fools gladly" mentality. This is a common enough adolescent attitude, particularly among those of well-above-average intelligence. Most people get over this phase, as part of the maturation process.

Unfortunately, adulthood is not the inevitable result of getting older, and all too many generally bright people go through their entire lives completely unaware of how easy it is to overestimate the distance to the nearest fool.

@dank48

As I said, how exactly are your posts any different than tweckling? Other than a 140 character limit, there isn't much of a difference. You have every right to call people "mobbing-rationalizers" and "fools". Just as much as people have every right to speak their minds on twitter during a horrible conference keynote.

If the tweckles were blog posts, online comments to a video, or words whispered under the table... would they be considered so rude? Micro-blogging and other real time technologies allow attendee's to not only let their comments made to those there, but their colleagues all over the world. This is how social media works.

You are right,
I am wrong.
For the love of God,
can we please move on.
--Karma FTW!

Well, Lougan, while this seems suspiciously like cross-talk, my posts are not intended to publicly humiliate a person engaged in giving a public presentation to an audience, where everyone is present in real time and real space, i.e. together. It would be, and for that matter is, perfectly legitimate to criticize the presentation. Afterward. In a civilized albeit doubtless incisive and perhaps even uncomplimentary fashion.

It's the difference between a critic who writes an unfavorable review of a play and a boor who throws garbage at the stage during the performance, or the difference between a teacher who writes constructively critical comments on a paper and a "teacher" who deliberately humiliates an unprepared student in class, or between an orderly, timely, lawful trial and a lynch mob.

Sure, I've said some uncomplimentary things about the jackals and hyenas who mobbed these speakers, and I stand by my comments, unless you can direct my attention to a specific example where I got ad hominem. (That could be tricky, since I know no one involved, any more than any other readers do.) Why those nouns, which are obviously not literally correct? They describe the behavior that was exhibited: graceless, predatory, ruthless, and inhuman. Group-think leads to group-action, and I truly don't think the mentality exhibited at these presentations is qualitatively different from that of a lynch mob.

The crucial point is that, for all our glitzy, shiny, state-of-the-art toys, we are not really very different from our ancestors who lived in bands of a hundred or so on the African savannah, except that for the most part, we don't live there or like that any more and haven't for a long time. The xenophobic us-vs.-them mind-set that was evolutionarily useful thousands of years ago is still present, as current events make clear. It just isn't nearly so useful, usually, as it once was. When it bursts out in a mass attack of "everyone" against the "one" offender, we better comprehend human sacrifice.

There were no nooses or altars literally present at these outbursts. So what? The crowd smelled blood, and the crowd went for the kill. There's no literal blood on anyone's hands, but again, so what?

I'm going on too damn long about this, but at least I'm not risking real-time evisceration for it. The last point, corny as it may seem, is that we shouldn't do to others what we're not willing to have others do to us. It's easy enough to say, "Well, I'd never give that lame a performance." It's harder to ensure that the audience will always agree with your own high estimate of the value of your presentation. And by the time you've realized your mistake, they'll be on you.

I was at the HighEdWeb conference with the infamous keynote. I was also at the Web 2.0 Expo this week with the keynote in question. As one who has personally experienced both episodes, I am relatively well equipped to have an open, honest, and thoughtful conversation on the matter. Most authors of the inflammatory commentary I have seen and heard were at neither. It hardly seems productive to engage in a discussion when opinions have already been formed, not from first hand experience, but from assumptions made. I welcome an intelligent conversation. Otherwise, the point is moot, the horse is dead, and nothing can be learned when one chooses to ignore the input of others.

@dank48: When you start your stream of rants with "How long before someone has had enough of this and responds to tweckling with real violence? The Second Amendment kind.", I wonder if campus security has a file on you.

Laoshi, I doubt that campus security has a file on me, since there'd have to be a campus.

There are a zillion firearms in this country. There are also a fair number of people whose mental stability is not absolutely guaranteed. One assumption the "audience" made in this revolting episode was that the presenter was not in a position to retaliate, sanely or otherwise. The mod got away with it this time.

Heaven knows I'm not saying violence would be justified in such a situation, any more than it's justified in any other situation where life and limb are not threatened. But it would be, to some extent at least, understandable.

To regard social constraints as a handicap that hampers the actions only of others but leaves oneself free to behave in whatever manner one chooses is to misunderstand the nature of these constraints. As has been said often before, "manners are what keep us from tearing each other to pieces." Or from shooting each other every time our points of view fail to mesh perfectly.