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[larryc]

Admit it--some of you were in on this, weren't you?

"Too bad they took my utensils away w/ my plate. I could have jammed the butter knife into my temple."

http://chronicle.com/article/Conference-Humiliation-/49185/

[lorelei]

On the upside, this kind of thing might increase panel attendance....

[cranefly]

On the upside, this kind of thing might increase panel attendance....

And people may take the time to polish their talks!

[hipgeek]

Thank you, larryc! This is hysterical. 

And it makes me far more self-conscious about my upcoming conference presentation, so, yes, thank you for that.

[conjugate]

Chilling in a way, as well.  I mean, yes, the speaker should have researched his audience and prepared better, but still, common courtesy would suggest a minimum of respect.  Of course, I've been to some talks that would have resulted in a Twitter-mobbing.  One respected mathematician comes to mind; near the end of his career, he mostly just babbled about things he'd done years ago and mentioned a few ideas that other people were working on without giving any real detail. 

I was struck by one respondent who claimed that he responded to the tweets by modifying his talk as he went and I wonder if that's do-able for most speakers.  Many speakers have enough trouble making through the talk in a timely way without omitting any points or getting distracted without also keeping an eye on the various tweets to see who is saying what about the talk. 

I would give my talk in a state of blissful unawareness, and perhaps not know until/unless someone pointed the tweets out to me afterward.  Maybe that's best for those of us who find it challenging to walk and chew gum.  I mean, keeping track of the notes, remembering what to point out about this diagram, remembering to add, "Oh, the restriction x > 0 here means that this next step is legal, and that's why we can't yet generalize to ..." and discussing (according to how much time is on the clock)  what happens when we allow y to vary and how that leads to questions similar to those studied by...   Well, you get the idea.  Every talk may be a little different according to how things are running.

Trying to make the talk fit well in the time allotted without boring the audience is challenging enough without having to figure out who's tweeting, what they're tweeting about, and how (or whether) to deal with it.

[mad_doctor]

That's just rude.  Not only that, but those professors will go off and complain how their own students do the same thing in their own classes.  If they ever make an issue of it, I can imagine their students thinking, "but professors even do it to eachother..."

[locutus]

Maybe I'm missing something here (I know little about Twitter). This can only happen if the conference sets up a backchannel for people to tweet at? And then they display this live during the talk and during the rest of the conference? Is this happening at the big conferences, MLA, AHA, or just at ones with lots of technology folks?

I can't wrap my mind around something like this being set up at the conferences I usually attend.

[marigolds]

Maybe I'm missing something here (I know little about Twitter). This can only happen if the conference sets up a backchannel for people to tweet at? And then they display this live during the talk and during the rest of the conference? Is this happening at the big conferences, MLA, AHA, or just at ones with lots of technology folks?

I can't wrap my mind around something like this being set up at the conferences I usually attend.

I've seen people liveblogging MLA, but I can't imagine that Twitterfalls are going to be set up at anything but tech-heavy conferences anytime soon. 

[scampster]

Maybe I'm missing something here (I know little about Twitter). This can only happen if the conference sets up a backchannel for people to tweet at? And then they display this live during the talk and during the rest of the conference? Is this happening at the big conferences, MLA, AHA, or just at ones with lots of technology folks?

The twitter channels are set up by users - anyone can set up a #hew09 channel and people put that string at the end of their tweets so they get grouped in a single channel. So there really is no control over it.

New word I learned in the comments of he article: snarktard

[lotsoquestions]

Doesn't this whole idea kind of rest on the assumption that people don't go to conferences to learn from one another and support their colleagues -- but rather to pick on each other, belittle each other and engage in hurtful competition?  I don't know about you guys , but I know what conferences those are in my field and I usually prefer to give them a miss.

 I also wonder about whether the hurtful tweeting is equally distributed -- or whether it's particularly marked in situations where the old boys feel like there are interlopers in a field that should rightfully be theirs.  From the tone of the article, it sounds like a lot of the tweeting is about older people whose singular crime is that they're older, perhaps a little slower and not too trendy.  Strangely, I feel like often I learn from my older colleagues. 

I also wonder if perhaps the b*tchiness is actually a hallmark of  tweeters in general -- My big haired Southern SIL is a big tweeter and it's mostly along the lines of "can you believe she's wearing that? in public?"  It's kind of a like a moving, 24 hour convention of meangirls which is now tech enabled.  And I suspect she's not alone.

And I wonder if a lot of it is about underlying resentment ("if only that old codger would hurry up and retire, then I could get the job I want at university X") rather than anything that's actually being said or not said at a conference . . .

[voxprincipalis]

I also wonder if perhaps the b*tchiness is actually a hallmark of  tweeters in general -- My big haired Southern SIL is a big tweeter and it's mostly along the lines of "can you believe she's wearing that? in public?"  It's kind of a like a moving, 24 hour convention of meangirls which is now tech enabled.  And I suspect she's not alone.

What? No, of course not. You might as well say that b*tchiness is a hallmark of people with big hair.

VP

[locutus]

I also wonder about whether the hurtful tweeting is equally distributed -- or whether it's particularly marked in situations where the old boys feel like there are interlopers in a field that should rightfully be theirs.  From the tone of the article, it sounds like a lot of the tweeting is about older people whose singular crime is that they're older, perhaps a little slower and not too trendy.  Strangely, I feel like often I learn from my older colleagues. 

I don't know how much you can generalize about tweeting at conferences from this one example. If there had been a page set up at the conference I was most recently at I'm sure 90% would have been complaining about the conference organizers picking the hotel. Instead it was just the topic of much conversation. It's not like people at low-tech conferences don't complain about bad talks and the like.

[bookishone]

Maybe I'm missing something here (I know little about Twitter). This can only happen if the conference sets up a backchannel for people to tweet at? And then they display this live during the talk and during the rest of the conference? Is this happening at the big conferences, MLA, AHA, or just at ones with lots of technology folks?

The twitter channels are set up by users - anyone can set up a #hew09 channel and people put that string at the end of their tweets so they get grouped in a single channel. So there really is no control over it.

So let's say Conference Attendee sets up a channel called #ahasnark10. How does everyone else at the conference happen upon their tweet and thus discover this new channel? (I am revealing my tech ignorance here)

[larryc]

I have been at a couple of THATCamp digital humanities unconferences lately and they encourage the use of Twitter. The way it works is that people agree on a conference hashtag beforehand. At THATCamp the organizers did created one (#thatcamp) but I have seen people do it spontaneously outside the official organization and forward it via email lists, blogs and tweets. At the Western History Association this fall some grad students put out the word that the tag would be #wha (I think).

At THATCamp we were reminded to "use Twitter for good" and it never got snarky. People need to remember that though Twitter feels ephemeral, you are creating a permanent record.

I think that a Twitter feed can be a really valuable addition to a conference. At THATCamp someone would mention such-and-such digital tool or project in conversation and someone in the audience would find it and tweet the link. And to some extent it enables people outside the conference to participate. I tweeted a request for examples of X and in a few minutes I got two replies with examples--one from a person in England, another from Kansas.

What limits this from being more useful are the outrageous charges for internet use at major conferences. So you can twitter on your phone, but to do the more valuable work of finding a website or a fact online to add to the conversation, you need to pay to connect your laptop.

[marigolds]

It does seem like a significant part of the problem in this case is that the conference tweets were being projected in real-time behind the speaker.  This a) encouraged the pileon, and b) really messed with the speaker during the presentation (the audience reaction reflected what was going on backchannel.)  I don't understand the purpose behind these kinds of Twitterfalls anyway - one of the Six Commandments of Presentations is that people cannot both read and listen at the same time.  How is the audience - or the speaker - supposed to benefit from the real-time viewing of the conference tweets? 

I read another, similar story about a presentation that danah boyd [sic] gave where the same type of thing happened.  She asserts that if she could have seen the Twitterfall she could have adjusted to the audience feedback and changed the presentation on the fly. How the hell can you read your presentation AND the Twitterfall at the same time?