Back Channel Unleashed
Conference back channels have moved front and center – with a vengeance.
For those who don’t know, a back channel is the sub-conversation going on among members of a conference speaker’s audience. Conversations that used to occur as hallway banter now take place on Twitter, the popular microblogging service widely used on laptops and mobile devices.
Birth of the back channel
The back channel gained prominence during the 2007 SXSW conference, as attendees used Twitter to notify friends and colleagues of key session points and topics during the day, and after-parties going on into the night. Twitter clients had yet to be developed, so most conference-goers were monitoring the stream on cell phones and laptops. The messages added value to the experience, as audience members tweeted confirmation of salient points, or appended the presentation with dialogue of their own.
But what started out nearly three years ago as value-added instant communication, has now turned into a forum for critique, and in one case, downright harassment.
The first notable back channel revolt occurred at the 2008 SXSW conference when veteran Fox News and Business Week correspondent Sarah Lacey lobbed softball questions to a reticent Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook. In fairness to Lacy, it was most likely her friendly conversational interview style that drew the crowd’s ire, and Zuckerberg’s reluctance to open up. Regardless, the 23-year old billionaire didn’t bite, and the audience started tweeting a serious revolt.
Emboldened by what they were reading on their laptops and mobile devices, audience members started heckling Lacy’s questions, even breaking into a cheer when Zuckerberg (who was not monitoring Twitter comments) balked at one of Lacy’s feckless queries. Frustrated with the lack progress, Lacy turned questioning over to the audience and served as moderator for the remainder of the session.
Read more about the Lacy/Zuckerberg session here.
Senator 2.0
Back channel conversations are not limited to tech conferences, though. In a notable example that Twitter is more a part of the mainstream than some people think, several congressional representatives from both houses and both sides of the aisle went on a “decorum be damned” spree and tapped out partisan Twitter comments during president Obama’s quasi state-of-the-union speech in February. The flood of tweets streaming out of the capitol might have gotten more press, had it not been for the famous “You lie!” protocol breakdown by Rep. Joe Wilson, R-S.C.
The back channel moves forward
The most recent case of back channel mutiny took Lacy’s SXSW experience one notch further. Thanks to a confluence of circumstances at November’s Web 2.0 Expo in New York, Danah Boyd, a veteran public speaker who holds a Ph.D. from Berkeley, failed to quickly capture the audience’s attention during her session.
The Twitter back channel revolted against Boyd in a much quicker fashion than with Lacy, but there was a stark difference in the two presenters’ episodes.
Whereas Lacy conducted her interview in front of a curtain backdrop, Boyd’s talk took place in front of a giant video screen scrolling the Twitter stream. As she spoke, every back channel comment showed up on the screen behind her. And as the session wore on, the tweets got nastier, including a few comments that would qualify as sexual harassment had they occurred in the workplace. (Boyd addresses the comments, the cause of the session breakdown, and pines for future civility, in a very frank and personal blog post here.)
Taking charge of the back channel
Several blogs have recently taken note of the back channel reactions, and now concern is rising about how future conference organizers, session leaders, and speakers will handle the flow. New Zealand based presentation trainer Olivia Mitchell guest-posted a blog entry on this topic, entitled “Three Stages of Presenting with Twitter,” on the blog of Twitter for Dummies author Laura Fitton.
Mitchell suggests that presenters take control by using timed Twitter breaks during presentations, a friend or co-worker to serve as a Twitter monitor, or new plug-ins for both PowerPoint and Keynote, that automatically tweets key points as you click on a specific slide.
So, what’s your back channel story? Are you a presenter that has had to deal with a not-so-positive Twitter stream? As a conference participant, do you think the back channel adds value, or just serves as another distraction? Lets hear about it in the comments.
[...] Ed | March 21, 2011 in New Media Things | Comments (0) Hello there! If you are new here, you might want to subscribe to the RSS feed for updates on this topic.Powered by WP Greet Box WordPress PluginA new phenomenon that has paralleled with the rise of Twitter is the backchannel, a line of communication powered by twitter hashtags, at lectures, speeches and conferences. If you are unfamiliar with the concept, you can read a previous post I wrote about the topic by clicking on this post – Back channel Unleashed. [...]
[...] will play a big role in this, as events will rapidly see as a basic requirement the integration of back-channels, the provision of digital facilities for participants to learn and contact each other easily, as [...]
I actually had a mildly negative back channel experience recently. At a session on improvised music for media, I stated that using a song like “Surfin’ USA” for a family vacation video was legal under the “fair use” doctrine. Another participant in the session immediately tweeted that if you didn’t own the rights, you were in violation. I quickly ran a wikipedia search on “Fair Use” and posted a bit.ly link – and that was that. Sad thing for me was, that this was the first back channel message I sent, andI was petrified to tweet again for about an hour.
I find the whole thing a bit annoying though. Trying to keep up on my iphone with Tweetie was a bit bothersome, kind of like paying attention to the news scroll on CNN. I finally turned off the phone and checked tweets between sessions.
I am not quite sure how much this actually qualifies as a true “back channel,” but I know that at the TweetUps I have attended, obviously a live stream of Tweets is to be expected. As can also be expected, the tweets were positive and followed the flow of the night. At one point there was a guest speaker who might have taken a second or so longer on the floor than he should have, but to the credit of the crowd, no one called him out Twitterly.
I think the back channel has become a “checks and balance” of the common man. It holds people more accountable. And it makes the public less tolerant of what politicians, modern media, or anyone with a voice that used to be able to hide behind the crowds inability to communicate until they were done speaking used to be able to get away with.
The social voice is more powerful now than it ever has been and I can only see good things coming from this, as long as we can use it right. I do not agree with attacking a person publicly for the sake of comedy, but there is a right way to swing that ax.
All that said, it seems the “back channel” has been replaced by a much bigger pipeline….