Tim "Mumbrella" Burrowes is over live blogging (or tweeting) and Katie "GetShouty" Chatfield is feeling the same way.
It's important to note that this kind of activity is still limited to certain events full of "webby" people. Many of the events I go to have no live blogging nor tweeting (and varying proportions of live attendees). So this is a bit of a minority issue but let's assume these behaviours will spread over time.
Rather than seeing tweeting and blogging as potentially distracting activities and so a disaster, I think they may be an opportunity to improve the event experience - if used with a bit of thought by the savvy presenter.
I am not really a fan of straight "presenting". My short attention span means that I'm getting bored of my own voice just after the first slide. I would much rather have others play with and critique or extend my ideas rather than have them received as so much cognitive junk mail - and these new whizz-bang "Web 0.2" technologies allow this to happen. If you build twitter-based activities into your session or offer 3 questions you want to invite the audience to blog about at the end, then you are creating a space for this interaction. At other times, you can invite participants to put down their devices and briefly give you their full attention.
This does require those with a "speaking" role to act more like facilitators than presenters. It means that you probably have to learn improv as well as voice projection, posture, storytelling and visual design to be good at this. It also means that speakers have to accept a more humble but ultimately more powerful role than "the sage on the stage". The only justifiable reason to get on a stage is to change the world a little bit, everything else is ego. And if you want to change the world, that means that the action is out there in the audience - they are the future and you, as a speaker, are the past. You have to go where the action is and tools like twitter can light up the action for you like a flare.
So what else can we do to make events better?
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4 comments:
That's well argued, Matt.
Sounds like a great way to use the likes of Twitter. I'd argue that's using it the right way.
But I'd also argue that while most presentations aren;t like that, live blogging isn;t that helpful.
Cheers,
Tim - Mumbrella
Big fan of audience participation myself and I like your ideas about including a feedback channel. Love collaboration. Love improv. A great thought starter.
I think that creating this space is a very different use of twitter or live blogging than the usual reportage/ commentary that I usually participate in.
What I was feeling is, that tweeting while someone is trying to talk to me is distracting - and that I find I get more out of what a presenter is saying if I concentrate on them.
I'd like to think it's a little more respectful to the person who's trying to hold the room.
I like the notion that being on stage encompasses a responsibility to change the world and conquer ego. I think that twitter can be seen as a stage too- and I wonder if tweeters could task themselves with the same standards when they condense all the power that is in the room to 140 characters.
Tim - Fair enough.
Katie - "I think that twitter can be seen as a stage too"
Totally and your point about Twitters taking responsibility for their actions is well made. But I also think that organizers and presenters can do a better job of setting that stage and managing that environment...
Hi Matt- Katie alerted me to your post on similar subject matter to my post at http://catalystformagic.posterous.com/we-have-met-the-enemy-and-he-is-powerpoint-or and I have linked to yours here. Very helpful perspectives adding to the richness of the online dialogue!
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