Against live-tweeting at conferences
jasonlefkowitz.net
Against live-tweeting at conferences
1–10 of 51 posts
Re: Against live-tweeting at conferences
#2Good points. I also feel people tend to tweet that they are enjoying everything, simply to make themselves look like they are always going to interesting things and thus worth following. Similarly, no one can say anything negative, since they are essentially going behind the speaker's back (...in public...)
Re: Against live-tweeting at conferences
#3As 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.
Re: Against live-tweeting at conferences
#4I'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.
Re: Against live-tweeting at conferences
#5Well, 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.
Re: Against live-tweeting at conferences
#6People 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.
Re: Against live-tweeting at conferences
#7I'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.
Re: Against live-tweeting at conferences
#8Well, 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…
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.
Re: Against live-tweeting at conferences
#9Re "backchannel"s
Most conferences I've been to have had official irc channels designated for chatter during talks.
The point probably being that people chatting via text is less interrupting than speaking out loud and interrupting.
Re: Against live-tweeting at conferences
#10Hm, 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 :).