Against live-tweeting at conferences | Hacker News Reader

Against live-tweeting at conferences

jasonlefkowitz.net

74 pointssmacktoward49 comments

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.

I don't get why people are downvoting this - anyone care to chime in as to what he said that was downvote-worthy?

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).

I don't see a substantial difference in tone between the article and my post. Instead of downvoting me, why not explain the difference between "tweeting" and "live-tweeting"? I don't see one there either; it seems like an attempt to avoid thinking critically about internet habits and I suspect the downvotes are more reflective of my comment hitting too close to home than it being off-topic.

Tweeting: Broadcasting messages on twitter.

Live-tweeting (see also live-blogging): Broadcasting messages on twitter in directly relation to and following the goings-on of the event you're currently participating in .

Livetweeting also has the ability to be a kind of note taking. If you've ever watched a live blog, it's the same concept, just with a shorter text field.

If you haven't and have no idea of the concept, here's a recent one:

http://live.cnet.com/Event/Googles_next_dimension_of_Maps_ev...

Tweeting: Wow this conference is boring as heck, and the food sucks too #firstworldproblems

Live-tweeting: Foonly just announced that the foomatic v2 will have high-speed backchannel integration! #foocon2012

I know what live tweeting is, I was inviting someone to explain how it is different from tweeting in terms of being an unnecessary distraction. With all the ways slides and videos and blog posts disseminate news following tech conferences I'm having trouble thinking of a less efficient way to do so than for dozens of people to be "live tweeting" nuggets from a talk 140 characters at a time.

This is not twitter-bashing, I really feel that as a matter of basic decency and for their own intellectual growth audiences should be actively listening and making connections so that after the talk they can have something more interesting to say than "tl;dr".

If you are so caught up in your initial reactions to a speaker that you pre-emptively distract yourself you are missing out on a lot of opportunities for insight into yourself and your community. I don't see the value in dozens of people flying to a city just to sit in hotel ballrooms and regurgitate things over the wifi.

Can't help but agree with you here. I think tweeting (whether about the conference or not), surfing the web, reading/responding to email, etc. during a talk are symptomatic of the same inability to maintain focus and to think deeply when that's not PRECISELY what we want to be experiencing in a given moment.

Because of the fleetingness of the things we do online, even if the particulars are boring and mind-numbing (e.g., reading fifteen Cracked Top 10 articles in a row, or fruitlessly tweeting to tech celebrities in hope of a reply), we don't notice because the experience in general gives us the impression of fulfillment by virtue of its variety alone.

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).

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.

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.

That's a good point.

I'm guessing trying to just stream video of an event like that would (a) raise all sorts of rights issues and (b) not be adding much editorial value.

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.

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.

It is especially surprising given that conference tickets are usually really expensive.

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.

Their phone is their memory of it. We are outsourcing part of our brain to our devices. This is lamentable, but probably inevitable.

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?

> And, after all, wasn't that kind of the original purpose for a photograph? To capture an awesome moment you want to memorize?

Good point, but it wasn't until somewhat recently that the camera taking those photographs had a virtually endless supply of film. I think there's a HUGE difference between taking a couple of pictures to remember the event and literally spending the entire evening watching through your phone's screen.

It reminds me of the scene in Ocean's 13 where they demolish the casino right behind Don Cheadle, but he's watching it on TV instead of turning around.

The difference your thinking of is called percentage of time used. For instance, I also liked taking pictures at a concert I went to, I didn't do it to brag though, in fact they never touched the internet. (Okay technically they were dropbox synced, but I digress.) It would seem to me that most everything can be done with reason and in moderation without it becoming bad.

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.

What delay would you tolerate? One minute? One hour? One day?

Why tolerate a delay when there is no need to? I'm sorry but there is no talk in the world where every single person is going to be completely engaged. This is such a non issue, like a teacher wasting an entire class to discuss a minor discipline problem.

Not every person in every room you're invited to talk to will absorb and care about every word that leaves your mouth. If they're minding their own business then just ignore them.

If you get distracted by people doing it or are bothered by the large number of people doing it, then you need to drastically improve your speaking skills. You distract too easily and/or your talks are boring.

Re "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.

I feel like a lot of speakers nowadays, especially those at technical conferences, are aware that people just split their attention between presenters and their gadgets.

It's good to be aware of your audience, but not overly so. You can derail a good talk by misjudging your audience and making yourself look overly self-conscious and awkward.

You can even take advantage of it at some kinds of talks. If you assume some percentage of your audience has a device with internet access, give them some online supplementary material, or demo, or interactive data, or something similar to accompany your talk. There's a lot of nice stuff you can do on the web that's better than powerpoint slides.

I also tend to find that, at academic conferences, better questions come from people who're following along with the accompanying paper during the talk.

Good 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...)

I don't know. I often note down key points on my phone anyway, just in my notes. The times I've live tweeted, I just decided to share the note instead. I like being able to look back at the end of the day and see the key points from that session. I think I remember it much better with that memory hook. A full day of conference sessions and meeting people in between can become a blur after.

I don't read tweets while in session, but it might be a good idea to check for DMs or something, to see if a coworker or peer wants me to ask something during the Q&A. All the Google IO sessions may be on YouTube nowadays, but you still have the best chance to get your question answered if you are there live or have a proxy.

I have mixed feelings about this. I don't think it's necessarily rude since you aren't (necessarily) detracting from the experience of the people around you. It may be rude to the speaker, but it's become common to the point that I'm not even sure about that.

Also, I noticed the use of "between you and I." I really hate this. It's incorrect, and I see it everywhere. Can we put a stop to this? I know this is a bit nit-picky, but we jump all over "your" vs "you're." This is the same, but it's a more understandable mistake.

Might as well also mention this

"...and her message. And you’re hurting the presenter, since the message you’re sending to them."

'Her' then 'them'? I feel like whenever people put "her" when it's not defined, they are actually pausing or backtracking to purposefully place 'her' where they'd normally place 'his'. Much simpler would be 'the' or 'their', in this case.

Relevant http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/lexicon_valley/2012/0...

Hi, author of the post here. You're right, that's just a dumb mistake I should have caught in proofreading. I've edited to make it consistent.

Thanks!

As one of the commenters on the OP mentioned, live-tweeting is often used as a means of note-taking, and much like the commenter in question, I find it's crucial if I want to stay engaged with both the presenter and the content. I could keep it to myself, but if it's contributing value for others by making it public (and it usually is), why not? I do have total empathy for the agitation it can cause a presenter, though, so I do my best to model attentive behavior anytime I'm not jotting down a note.

Here's a caveat: one conference presentation I attended turned into a sales pitch and everyone knew it. I felt perfectly justified in tweeting at that point.

The value of live tweets to others is not great, either (although it is nonzero). You can only cram about half an idea in a live tweet.

Any subtlety, nuance, or context just gets steamrolled as people struggle to type in whatever catchy one-liner they managed to comprehend while reading their phone.

The lesson for speakers: have a clear message and speak in aphorisms. Also, repetition.

i respectfully disagree

i was at the Times Open announcement years ago which was one of the first events to be live tweeted

the organizers were shocked at the time but they realized that this got them great publicity. my live tweeting, it turned out, made me some connections with people that have helped me greatly in my work since then

I don't see how live-tweeting is significantly different (from the speaker's point of view) with someone taking notes; either way they don't look up much and either way their attention is on making a record of what is being said.

Notes can be revised before they become public, which is useful if the twatter misunderstood something.

If people are "distracted" by their cellphone during your presentation, the problem might not be the cellphone...

Irony: At the end of this anti-tweeting rant, basically the first thing I see is "Follow me on twitter".

A talk is not teaching in front of an elementary school class. You don't deserve attention just because you showed up. You have to earn it.

If most people are live tweeting or doing other things during your talk, then I guess you didn't earn it. The last people to blame is your audience for that problem. They didn't write your presentation or choose the title of it.

It's like a director blaming the audience for walking out of a movie. We can start a big debate about the culture or how rude that is, but we won't learn anything or solve anything. We're not going to change human nature with an indignant conversation.

What you do have the power to change though is selling your talk properly to the right people, make it engaging, and stop getting distracted by people who frankly aren't distracting unless you're very self conscious. These are deficiencies in your public speaking skills, not a problem with every audience you've encountered.

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