My personal post on the backchannel at the Microsoft-sponsored Social Software Symposium I just attended is already yielding a range of reactions. Not surprisingly, some of those reactions are critical. The idea of a backchannel can be pretty damn scary—but my sense is that the fear comes most often from people who haven’t participated in one, and therefore are likely to both overestimate its negativity and underestimate its value.
I’ve written before about the modes I’ve observed in the backchannel at conferences, but I don’t think I’ve done a good job of talking about the benefits that accrue to participants in these channels as a result of their participation, or the benefits that “leak out” of the channel both during its existence and afterwards.
Let’s start with why the backchannel springs up, particularly at conferences with people who are (theoretically) there because they want to be there, and therefore predisposed to be interested. (That’s a very different context than a classroom or training venue where students are there because they have to be.)
Seb Paquet notes one reason that a backchannel might emerge in such a setting— to allow “otherwise captive audiences [to] rush inside as soon as things feel too stuffy.” But it’s not just when they’re stuffy—it’s also when it’s something the audience members may be interested in, but have heard before—increasingly the case when there’s overlap between gatherings, and somewhat inevitable when you have a bimodal audience like the one at this symposium, and couldn’t take background and shared context for granted.
The backchannel when an audience isn’t engaged in the presentation—whether or not it’s the “fault” of the presenter—does sometimes border on being rude, and critics are absolutely right to call me (and the other participants in these chats) out on this issue. We may well be allowing ourselves a degree of rudeness by cloaking it in technology, and that bears watching and checking. However, the backchannels I’ve participated in, for the most part, have had a minimum of this behavior, and a lot more that adds value. (In fact, as I skimmed the transcripts I saved from the backchannels at this symposium while writing this article, I found remarkably little criticism or negativity, but lots of rich content.)
So, on to the issue of how these emergent location-based backchannels add value to an experience for the participants—and even for the non-participants.
One advantage provided is the ability for people to respond instantly to interesting ideas, while the topic is still fresh in their mind. In the past, I wrote (some of) these things down in my private notes, which meant that they were useful to me and only me (unless I later wrote them up for my blog). It also meant that if I misheard or misunderstood, I was stuck with my misinformation. When the observations are posted in the channel, however, they provide an opportunity for instant feedback and clarification. Take, for example, this brief exchange from #socialcomp during danah boyd’s presentation on Tuesday afternoon. danah had referred to a community of “burners” on Friendster, which was a cultural reference not all of the listeners were familiar with:
user1: what are burners?
user2: burning man
user3: supposedly burning man -related people
user4: people who go to the Burning Man festival
user1: what is the Burning Man festival?
user5: aka playahs
user1: ??
user3: playahs is different.
user6: user1, it’s a big counterculture gathering in the middle of the desert. lots of portable art, http://www.burningman.com/
user7: user1, this is the NITLE Blog Census gender x topic thing that I was talking about
user7: http://www.blogcensus.net/weblog/archive/8.htm
user8: danah says “collapsed context=true self”
user9: user7: do you want to get the Blog census guy in here?
user1: thanx user7
user7: “in here”?
user9: in channel?
user8: bruce sterling article on burning man from wired (1996): http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.11/burningman.html
Note that there are actually two conversations going on here; one question being posed about danah’s reference, one following up on an earlier question by the same user regarding blog census information. Both resulted in URLs being posted to the channel, and both served to resolve questions on-the-fly. Because a misunderstood reference can make it difficult to grasp the points the speaker is making, these kinds of immediate responses are very valuable. (Yes, I realize that asking out loud accomplishes this, as well. But many people aren’t comfortable doing that out loud, as any classroom teacher can tell you. Additionally, at this event we were specifically asked to hold our questions until the end of each panel.)
In the comments to my post on mamamusings, Scott Golder suggests that audience members should take notes privately, and save this kind of discussion and clarification for after the talk. But there are several problems with that approach. The first is that the discussions after the talk typically take place in very small groups, often among people who already know each other and have a shared frame of references, so there’s less opportunity for new or unexpected voices to chime in. The second is that in most conferences, the talk time is minimal compared to the listen time, so there aren’t a lot of opportunities to hash out all the ideas that might arise during the presentations. And a third I alluded to above, that waiting to get clarification may have a significantly negative impact on your ability to understand and process the talk that you’re hearing.
In addition to providing real-time collaborative information related to the speaker’s topic, the links provided in the channel throughout the day were available later to anyone who chose to archive the discussion. (As an aside, I also attempted to archive most, if not all, of the URLs posted to the channel over in del.icio.us, under a specific heading of socialsoftware/symposium.)
For people not at the event, real-time discussion (ideally coupled with an audio and/or video stream) allows those not physically at the event to participate remotely, posting questions and related information that can then be used by those in the room, often resulting in questions that might not have been asked in the room.
Another benefit that accrues from a real-time chat accompanying the presentation is the ability to cross-reference transcript portions with times. What were people talking about when Steve Johnson made his interesting remarks about echo chambers vs flame wars? What were they talking about when Mimi Ito discussed untethered social networks? At least three people have asked me to send them transcripts from the open chat channel, specifically so that they can see what people were saying during their talks. The time-stamping that many IRC clients offer (I use Conversation, which posts the time every five minutes in the cat stream) makes it easy to do this.
danah boyd and Clay Shirky and I had a bit of a debate during the second day of the conference about whether the backchannel was exacerbating or reducing fragmentation of the people at the event. danah felt that the IRC channel was creating a problematic split between those who knew how and/or had the tools to access the channel, and those who didn’t. Clay and I argued that the overall fragmentation at the event was actually being reduced by the backchannel, rather than increased.
In the physical context of a conference or meeting (especially one that attempts to bring together diverse populations, or one that brings together old friends who seldom have face-to-face contact opportunities), people tend to cluster with those that they know and feel comfortable with. Colleagues and friends sit at the same table, have lunch together, share insights. It can be very difficult for anyone to work up the courage to break into these physical groups, introduce themselves, try to find common context for conversation. But the backchannel doesn’t have a limited number of chairs. Anyone can join—and as the two-day event wore on, more and more people did. It allowed conversations to occur between people who wouldn’t have known to seek each other out otherwise. In my case, there were at least five different people who approached me during breaks based solely on the backchannel conversation—they were interested in what I’d said, or had information on what I’d asked, and wanted to take the conversation deeper; that simply wouldn’t have happened without #socialcomp.
It is also true that at least one secondary backchannel arose at this event, and that it was a more “exclusive” environment. I’d argue, however, that exclusive is too often considered a pejorative term; I would actually describe it as more “intimate.” It was people who knew each other already, who had shared context for remarks, who wanted to strengthen existing friendship bonds.
The nice thing about these secondary backchannels (and it’s entirely possible that there were others that I didn’t know about, with people not in my close social network) is that they (1) can coexist with the larger public backchannel (this is one of the things I love about IM, too…that I can have two simultaneous “private” conversations going on without overlap or intrusion), (2) can be created and dissolved quickly and easily, and (3) aren’t constrained by physical barriers (if you’ve got more than two people in your intimate network, you can’t sit next to all of them at once).
Compare the “private backchannel” to one of the round tables seating up to six participants in the conference room. Was the selection of who was at a given table somewhat exclusionary? Sure. Are some of the conversations at those table private? Yes. Is that a bad thing? I certainly don’t think so. I don’t have the desire to be part of the intimate social network of everyone at an event I attend—and even if I did, that’s not an entitlement that anyone should be able to demand.
There are many topics I find myself wanting to explore in this space. What factors correlate most with fear or resentment of the backchannel? How does participation in a backchannel change the participants’ views of an event or ctivity? The speakers’ views? The organizers of events? To what extent does the backchannel subvert authority and/or undermine credibility? What happens when we empower an audience to do ridiculously-easy group-forming on the fly in a specific location? Closer to home for me, how will these backchannels change the way we teach? Or the way we conduct routine meetings? (Many faculty in my department, for example, want to ban laptops from faculty meetings because of the growing use of IM between faculty.) And on the tools side, how can we build tools that integrate real-time activity like chats and im’s with notetaking and recording?
This backchannel thing isn’t going away, folks. We have to learn to live with it, to live in it, to thread it into our tools and activities. Or at the very least, we have to learn to tolerate it, and understand that it can’t simply be banished or ignored.
1. Emil Durkheim on April 1, 2004 9:42 AM writes...
I think you're right-- it's not going to go away. But the perpetrators, no less than the victims, have to learn to live with it and its consequences.
Meanwhile, it's rude and it's divisive and it encourages invidious distinctions between haves and have-nots.
And the "let 'em eat cake" attitude, combined with the blaming-the-victim construction of what's happening, is less than no help at all.
So by all means, the designated few can stand in the corner being intimate and sniggering behind their hands at presenters. But please don't come to my talk.
Permalink to Comment2. Clay Shirky on April 1, 2004 10:05 AM writes...
Haves and have-nots might be an issue at a general conference, but this conference was *about* social software. Expecting someone who studies online interaction to be able to use the tools is no different than expecting an anthropologist to be able to speak the language of the culture he or she is studying.
So anyone not on the open channel was not there by choice, not from exclusion.
And of course we're coming to your talk -- we want to hear what you have to say, and to talk about it with one another.
Permalink to Comment3. Emil Durkheim on April 1, 2004 11:01 AM writes...
We weren't talking about the Social Software conference, we were talking about conference presentations generally, and maybe other kinds of presentation as well. And sorting out which kinds of behavior are (in)appropriate under what sorts of circumstances is the issue here.
Male anthropologists are not admitted to female-specific tasks/rites and vice versa; members of one moiety are not admitted to the private arrangements of others; and so on. And anthropologists don't have to master a technology in order to study it, although that certainly helps. Establishing conventions of usage and inclusion/exclusion around the use of new technologies is the issue here.
So: back-channels are rude, just as passing notes around on paper is rude. And they exclude the presenter, as well as those paying attention from the flow.
That's a real problem which needs to be addressed in a way which is not dismissive of those injured. Whether or not they are using (or can use) the latest technology. And at different levels of intimacy, in public and in private.
Permalink to Comment4. Clay Shirky on April 1, 2004 11:38 AM writes...
No question about conventions of use, but the conventions are going to be context specific, and this context was a social software conference, where there's obviously going to be a lot more use of these tools, and a lot less tolerance for people who can't hack the tech. Behavior will be different where the audience is less tech savvy and less able to understand the social norms of technology.
As for the idea that back channels are rude just as passing notes on paper is rude, it seems worth noting that people pass notes on paper at conferences all the time, as well as whispering to one another. So the rudeness seems to set an upper limit for the behavior, pre-wifi, rather than simply cutting it off. What we need to work out is the (social) limits of use.
Those of us in the back-channel became sensitive to places where the behavior became distracting, which was when it broke into the real room in the form of audible out-of-sync reactions. On the whole though, it was less distracting to those paying attention to the flow than either note-passing or whispering would have been, as it was no different as a distraction than people checking their email.
On that subject, it's also worth noting that there are two layers of behavior here -- the wifi-enabled behavior and the chat-enabled behavior, and once you accept the inevitability of wifi, the chat calculation becomes quite different.
To quote myself from 2002:
"Groups of people have diverse interests, so no matter how generally scintillating a meeting overall, at some point someone is going to find the subject at hand dull. The in-room chat helped alleviate this boredom, while keeping the participants talking to one another about the subject at hand.
"This is the advantage hardest to understand in the abstract. When I talk about the in-room chat, people often ask "But isn't that distracting? Don't you want to make people pay attention to the speaker?" This is similar to the question from the early days of the Web: "But why have any outside links at all? Don't you want to make people stay on your site?"
"Once you assume permanet [wifi, in practice], this logic crumbles. Anyone with a laptop or phone can, if they are bored, turn to the Internet, and the question becomes 'Given that attendees will be using the network, would you rather have them talking to one another, or reading Slashdot?'"
Permalink to Comment5. Clay Shirky on April 1, 2004 11:50 AM writes...
Oops, a pointer to that article might have helped: In-Room Chat as a Social Tool - http://www.openp2p.com/pub/a/p2p/2002/12/26/inroom_chat.html
Permalink to Comment6. Shelley on April 1, 2004 12:13 PM writes...
Clay, I don't think you're addressing the context of Emil's statement, about this as general behavior at all conferences. However, that aside, I do have to address your statement:
"Groups of people have diverse interests, so no matter how generally scintillating a meeting overall, at some point someone is going to find the subject at hand dull. The in-room chat helped alleviate this boredom, while keeping the participants talking to one another about the subject at hand."
True, but for most of the conferences I've attended, there are usually different tracks for different interests, and for the most part, the person is interested in what's being said. For those who aren't, they have quietly gotten up and left.
No matter how well intentioned, an unauthorized backchannel at a conference is going to elicite reactions from the audience not synchronized with the presentation, and this is going to cause confusion and disruption. Someone quietly online reading their email, or browing the internet, is unlikely to react in such a way to disrupt the atmosphere of the room.
As for whispering and note taking at conferences, I've rarely seen that. The only this occurs, usually, is at interactive panels, or in larger presentation rooms. Never in the intimate presentation rooms that most presentations are given in.
Within an intimate presentation environment, a backchannel can't help but be disruptive, unless, it was specifically designed to be part of the environment.
An unauthorized, invite only, 'friends' only, backchannel in the midst of a presentation given by a person not aware this was happening strikes me as rude, and disruptive.
There has to be boundaries to social software -- the use of software does not make rude behavior suddenly less so.
Permalink to Comment7. Emil Durkheim on April 1, 2004 12:17 PM writes...
We weren’t talking about the Social Software conference, we were talking about conference presentations generally, and maybe other kinds of presentation as well. And sorting out which kinds of behavior are (in)appropriate under what sorts of circumstances is the issue here.
Establishing conventions of usage and inclusion/exclusion around the use of new technologies is the issue here.
That’s a real problem which needs to be addressed in a way which is not dismissive of those injured. Whether or not they are using (or can use) the latest technology. And at different levels of intimacy, in public and in private.
Permalink to Comment8. Joe McCarthy on April 1, 2004 2:15 PM writes...
I guess I am very old-school: while I was using my laptop throughout the symposium, it was primarily to take personal notes rather than participate in the IRC channel (which seems to have been used by others as a collaborative note-taking medium, as well as for other purposes). I did occasionally look in on #socialcomp, but as I have not mastered the art of continuous partial attention, these glances were infrequent & brief.
My notes from the opening remarks include a reference to the theme of the event as "how humans interact with humans through technology" and a definition of Social Computing (by Shelley Farnham) as "research and development of technology supporting computer-mediated social interactions: enabling people to find, socialize and collaborate with people they care about online and offline." The online conversations during and since the symposium about the use of social computing technology _at_ the symposium demonstrate that much research remains to be done ... and offers a fabulous opportunity to do some of that research.
We've read from only a few of the participants; given that the organizers have a list of email addresses for all the attendees, I think it would be very interesting to conduct a survey of all of the participants to better understand what the perceptions and impacts were across the population. I'm not sure whether it would be better to focus only on the participants who were physically present or open it up to others who were tuning in via one or more of the channels.
A few potential questions: Did you think the impact of the channels was positive or negative (or mixed)? Did this perception differ based on if (or when) you were presenting? Which "camp" you are from? Which channel(s) did you join? Which channel(s) did you post to? What did you learn from the channel(s)? Do you think you flamed anyone? Do you think you were flamed? Did you feel closer or more distant to other participants as a result of the text chat? Would you use a channel [again] in a similar context in the future?
I am reminded by a story I heard on NPR, also blogged on SmartMobs (http://www.smartmobs.com/archives/000399.html), where it was reported that much of the audience that was seeing the first performance (in China) of Orwell's Animal Farm seemed more interested in text messaging via mobile phones than in watching the actual performance. Were they using their mobile phones to virtually "leave" the theater (chatting about topics unrelated to the play) or enhancing their experience of the performance through their use of SMS (chatting about topics that were related to the play, perhaps with other members of the audience)? We'll never know in that case, and it would be shame not to take greater advantage of the current "case" to learn more about the use and impacts of backchannels at the Social Computing Symposium.
Permalink to Comment9. Lucas on April 1, 2004 3:43 PM writes...
How fun! The next-generation blogging world should allow for backchannels. Here are the features required for the best way to support it:
1) Aggregate even cross-domain comments, i.e. comments on my site pointing to entries on yours.
2) Support subscribing to others' filters. By default you subscribe to the filter of the author of the blog but can change it to another or remove it altogether.
Now people are free to be as snarky as they please, making the blogworld much more fun and interesting!
Permalink to Comment10. Ben Hyde on April 1, 2004 4:24 PM writes...
This is really a discussion about what will emerge as good manners around the usage of this new technology. For example when the phone first moved into the house people had to struggle with what the rules of engagement were. Clearly are still shaking that out; but for example we generally don't ask the person we have interupted when call if this is a good time to talk. We just launch into the conversation and insist that they dig themselves out if they need to. In the real world we would never do even initiate the conversation without checking first that the person was manifesting a whole range of signs that he was ready for an interuption.
That suggests there is a strong likelyhood that what would be bad manners in a real world meeting will become accepted behavior in meetings as soon as it can happen below the awareness of the other parties to the meeting.
That said there is some deal implicit in attending a presentation. That the presenter is not perfectly impedenced matched to you or your cohorts doen't really seem like a sufficent excuse to break that deal. Arguing that this sometimes creates added value (and of course for the bored cohort it is nearly certain to) is only a step toward making the case that this value add is sufficent to clear the costs of breaking the deal.
Another subplot in all this is the range of meeting kinds. The cell phone in a theater isn't the same as a back channel in during a meeting at a conference where the presentations are just ornamentation on the primary purpose of the gathering, i.e. is to stitch together social networks.
Different contexts are likely to demand very different rules. Coordinating the agreement about those rules is extremely difficult in the absense of an authority. "Please remember to turn off your cell phones."
There is a whole subtext here about subgroups that decide to spin up their own rules, just because they can. That creates the usual tension between those who thought they had settled the rules, usually implicitly, and that group of innovators. Those trying to get something done may not find much value in renegotiationg the rules that provide the foundation for the task at hand.
All that said, I've found that a modicum of back channel can often make a meeting run an order of magnitude more efficently. For example I've seen it used to negotiate speaker order in a debate. I've seen it used to manage the hand raising, clearing some of the issues raised before they stole scarce time from the entire gathering. It can be very valuable to taking a vote offline. Enough value comes from this that I know get peeved if the other people on the conference call can't join us all in a chat room at the same time.
Permalink to Comment11. Clay Shirky on April 1, 2004 5:28 PM writes...
Emil, no matter how often you repeat the phrase "...is the issue here", you're not going to get me (or, I'm guessing, Liz) to drop the specifics of the situation. There is no "general case" for this kind of behavior.
Shelley gets at some of this by talking about different contexts, so, for the record, some of the constraints were:
- The conference setting wasn't intimate -- there were north of 50 people in a large room, so it broke any sense of overall group feeling that you get with a couple dozen or fewer attendees.
The conference was almost entirely plenary, and no one used a back-channel when we had breakout groups.
- We had been bussed half an hour to the middle of nowhere, so getting up and leaving wasn't much of an option, as there was no place else to go that had power, wifi, and table tops. Even if you just wanted to check mail, you had to be in the main room.
- The objections were to the (authorized) front- back-channel as well as to the (unauthorized) back- back-channel. The fact of lateral communications seemed to be the issue more than the exclusivity.
Something I don't remember if Liz mentioned or not, but which is important: on the first day, there was fairly narrow representation on the main irc channel, #socialcomp, starting with half a dozen or so in the morning, up to couple dozen by the end of the day. Day Two, though, saw more than half the attendees logging in, in part because one of the organizers saw that merely announcing the presence of the channel the previous day hadn't been enough, and saw how important the backchannel had become to the meeting as a whole.
The other thing that happened on Day Two was that criticism of the presentation, particularly as regards powerpoint formating (blue text on a bright red background; fonts that looked like embriodery stiching) became a normal part of the chat (the behavior which the previous day had gotten Liz shushed in the first place), _and_ the speakers would check the chat transcript after the fact to see what was said, making the whole thing more public and feedback-loop-y.
So there's a lot to be said for both more formal introduction of the techniques and for habituation in making the backchannel a net positive.
Permalink to Comment12. Jeremy Lyon on April 1, 2004 8:00 PM writes...
It seems to me that Ben Hyde's put his finger on what's going on in this discussion: it's all about the rules of appropriate social behavior.
My interpretation of Emil's point is, "When you sit in a meeting room at a conference to hear someone speak, you agree to pay exclusive attention to the speaker for as long as you stay." Even in the absence of ameliorating circumstances (like being bused to the middle of nowhere with no option to leave) I don't think Clay or Liz would agree to that point.
To take it a step further I'd say that it's about power relationships. On one side of the debate there's the idea that, for the duration of a talk, the speaker is an authority figure passing information to a receptive audience. The other side of the debate sees the speaker as a kind of guide leading the group toward the goal of mutual discovery.
Permalink to Comment13. Shelley on April 1, 2004 9:40 PM writes...
Jeremy, I don't see this as a power relationship, or as an either or. I've been to plenty of talks and presentations that were very interactive, but it was as a group, rather than having some members of the group split off into their own thing, regardless of the impact on others (or the sensibilities of the presenter).
Now, of a presentation is based on a backchannel, that's great. And if the presentation is in a room holding thousands, well then, who would notice (except probably the people around those involved online).
Clay's mention of context does apply...to a point.
For instance, I'm attending a set of talks and presentations at my local library on poetry, and books, and the Lewis and Clark expedition (anniversary here in St. Lou). The thought of even taking my laptop and tapping into it during the talk would be unthinkable. However, if I was going to an O'Reilly conference, I would have no hesitation on taking my laptop and tapping away on it, but I wouldn't check my email or browse -- my tapping would be to take notes. If I find the speaker isn't interesting, I'll get up quietly and leave. If the speaker starts a backchannel, I might participate, depending on the purposes. And if the ask for questions, and I have some, I would ask them.
But I wouldn't start a separate thread counter to the speaker, without their knowledge. I would preceive this to be rude. Power play or not, I perceive this to be rude.
For most presentations or talks, it is customary to expect to actually listen to the person talking, to give at least a pretense of interest, or quietly leave.
Is this a power play position? Or is this just plain courtesy?
Has courtesy been supplanted by social software?
Permalink to Comment14. Danyel Fisher on April 1, 2004 9:41 PM writes...
I think it's an interesting tension between rudeness and value--and, of course, the currency everywhere is attention.
My own thoughts:
Permalink to Commenthttp://drzaius.ics.uci.edu/blogs/danyelf/archives/000144.html
15. Martin Terre Blanche on April 2, 2004 6:30 AM writes...
Perhaps a useful new convention would be to set up a public projection of the official backchannel next to the speaker's powerpoint slides - which people (including the speaker) can pay attention to or not as they please.
Permalink to Comment16. Liz Lawley on April 2, 2004 10:01 AM writes...
Martin, that's something that's been tried a couple of times recently. There are two problems with it that I've observed. One is that an advantage of IRC on your personal screen is that you can ignore it in favor of the presentation as needed, then scroll back to catch what you missed--there's a blurring of immediacy and persistence. If it's projected, there's more pressure to keep reading because you might miss something.
More problematic is the fact that in an open channel, the fact that the discussion is being projected seems to serve as a magnet for people who are fascinated with the opportunity for visibility and disruption. As a result the channel becomes flooded with "Hi Mom!" kinds of messages, and the signal to noise ratio degrades sharply.
(See this post from last month for more on the topic.)
Permalink to Comment17. Emil Durkheim on April 2, 2004 1:49 PM writes...
Ben Hyde made my main point very well, I thought. We have new technologies, they enable new ways of working, these are not yet fully gelled as institutions, therefore the conventions of courtesy needed to make them work well haven't been worked out yet. This discussion, and others like it, are part of the working out.
I assume that's why Liz's first post in this thread moved away from exclusive concern with one particular event-- to get to conventions for dealing with the new ways of doing things, we have to consider many different kinds of circumstance.
It's true there is no general case for this kind of behavior, but there may well be classes of comparable case, and it would be good to find out. Using IM to help manage meetings seems to me a very good idea. Using it when everyone in the room has it available seems much better than using it when only a few do. It seems to me there are many contingencies like that which might reasonably influence conventions for using it, just as there are many contingencies which influence conventions for using other powerful and dangerous technologies (alcohol, for example).
That aside, there are pretty general rules of thumb for behaving in most cases, and they have wide currency. For example: "Do as you would be done by".
And (this my other point) those rules of thumb apply as much to discussions about IM use as they do to IM use itself. So it's not acceptable to denigrate people who raise questions about IM use (e.g., by speculating about their mental competence). The issue is not whether or not people can hack IM technology. The issue is whether or not back channel proponents can hack moral order.
Permalink to Comment18. Cath on April 4, 2004 4:32 PM writes...
Rather a silly thought, but will share anyhow. When in meetings, I write streams of thought on a piece of paper. I am afraid if I do not, I will lose them. How much of the motivation for chatting during presentations comes from an inability to be patient? Would the same dialogue be able to occur online AFTER the speaker is finished? As a society we have become less patient and more demanding. Seems to me the backchannel conversation is a reflection of our unwillingness to give someone the spotlight for a time period, without interrupting.
Having said that, I engage in this self-gratifying behaviour during meetings. And yes, I feel it is inappropriate. But DAMN it feels good!
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