Orcmid has
a good post on the back-channel, in which he rightly calls me out for the tone of
my earlier post. (In particular, I have since apologized to danah, both in the comments there and in private.)
Orcmid's key quote, I think, is this:
If the problem is the design or structure of meetings, or perceived inequities and power situations, deal with that. It is not a problem that technology will fix.
I absolutely agree with this, so let me first abjure any sense I might have given that I think there is a tech solution here -- this is absolutely something that requires careful meeting design. (I wrote about this in
In-room Chat as a Social Tool a couple of years ago.)
Where I agree with Orcmid (and Andrew Fiore) is in assuming that the core value in the conference is in its groupness. Where I disagree is in assuming that the group value mostly flows from the plenary presentations. From my experience of professional conferences, almost all such meetings have the same characteristic -- the hallway conversations are better than the contents of the talks.
So I am making two assumptions that Orcmid and Andrew don't, I think, share. First, the back-channel is a fact, not a choice. Every conference with Wifi will get a back-channel, and every conference will have Wifi in the next couple of years. So for me, any question of _whether_ to have a back-channel is already barking up the wrong tree -- all conference organizers will have to deal with it in some way or other. Even formally asking people to do part or all of the conference 'lids down' is a strategy that assumes the back-channel, rather than ignoring it.
The second assumption is that is there is huge untapped potential for lateral value among groups of attendees, and that if unlocking this value comes at the expense of some of the value for the presenter in having a room full of attentive (or at least not obviously distracted) listeners, there is still reason to explore whether the overall value of the conference is higher.
A talk is an incredibly lousy way to transmit facts -- if someone had invited me to the MSFT conference with the promise that I would walk away with all of the facts presented at that conference, but none of the social interaction, I wouldn't have gotten in a taxi to go there, much less a plane. We went for each other, and while talks have a way of shaping the conversation, they are less important now than they were pre-Web, when the pure information in the talk was harder to come by.
We're living in a remarkable period of experimentation with social form, where things like
FOO Camp abandon older organizational styles in favor of relying on attendee-created value. The back-channel brings some of that value (and tension and anarchy) into more established conference settings.
Taking Orcmid up on his challenge, I'm willing to admit the disadvantages of the back-channel -- it was distracting to people who chose to opt out, and emotionally hurtful to those who felt left out.
But I don't believe evidence of harm necessarily leads to the conclusion that the back-channel should be banned, both for practical reasons (it is basically unbannable) and philosophical ones (increasing value for lateral communications may well outweigh harm to older conference styles.)
So my counter-challenge is: Assume the back-channel is a permanent option, and in any large gathering (greater than two dozen, lets say) assume that at least some participants will form one. Now what?
1. Andrew T. Fiore on April 12, 2004 4:26 PM writes...
Clay, you are right that the potential for backchannels will soon be inescapable. It is probably wishful thinking on my part that participants would make a considered decision about whether to join a backchannel if it seems to have a disruptive effect.
On the other hand, the threat of social sanctions motivates people to turn off their cell phones in movie theaters even though the technology permits them to ring. Not the most apt analogy, but what if people felt similarly about backchannels during a conference?
I'm not saying they _should_ feel that way, because I think there can be great value in some backchannels at some events; rather, I just want to point out that the availability of the technology doesn't determine what people will do. The audience has control over its behavior.
Perhaps with longer breaks and more unstructured (but still specified in the schedule) time, people wouldn't feel as strong a need to interact laterally during talks, because they'd have ample time to do so at other times.
Permalink to Comment2. Liz Lawley on April 12, 2004 9:39 PM writes...
Andrew, I'm not sure that's just wishful thinking--in fact, there were a number of points even at the symposium that sparked this whole discussion where people chose not to participate. There was even a point where I shut the channel down entirely because it was becoming disruptive.
It was also instructive that during the breakout sessions, during which people felt engaged and connected, there was no backchannel at all.
Lots of issues factor into the extent of backchannel use even by those who find it beneficial:
* level of knowledge of what's being presented. People will tune out of the presentation and into the backchannel a lot faster if it's something they've heard many times before; the benefit of this is that they're then available as a background "expert system," as in my example of danah's reference to 'burners'
Permalink to Comment* physical setup of the conference; people who can't see well (for visual learners) or hear well (for auditory learners) are more likely to look for supplemental input from the backchannel; Sam Ruby mentioned this recently, too. As someone who has increasing hearing loss due to tinnitus, as well as a strongly visual learning style, I'm likely to find the backchannel much more appealing when I can't see or hear the speaker very well, and/or when the main visuals are ppt slides with teeny-tiny text.
* backchannel traffic increases with the length of enforced in-your-seat time. As Clay has pointed out, there was nowhere else to go, and there was no way to gracefully remove yourself from this symposium physically. I've seen the same thing happen when people are trapped in a row at a conference presentation--it's too hard or disruptive to get up and walk out, so they escape electronically, instead. (And believe me, I've seen this _plenty_ of times in my classrooms, as well.)
3. Ross Mayfield on April 13, 2004 2:07 AM writes...
So when its integrated with the event and everyone participates in the backchannel, is it a frontchannel?
Permalink to Comment4. reed on April 13, 2004 10:09 AM writes...
These discussions have been interesting to me since I am also reading a bit of history: reading about Englebart's NLS etc. Part of the idea there was that everyone in a meeting would be online in a collaborative manner, sharing reference material and making annotations, etc.
What if the presenter were a part of this back channel, and it became part of the presentation?
Or is it impossible for a person to do both: to talk in the room and share material online?
Permalink to Comment5. reed on April 13, 2004 10:13 AM writes...
I should also bring up the difference between chat which is competing with in-room chat, and sharing text, which supports it.
Permalink to Comment6. Maya on April 13, 2004 6:15 PM writes...
Here is the thing, I organize a technology conference. It is a conference that several participants in this blog have spoken at or participated in. Each meeting is only a general session (no breakouts), and is attended by around 100 senior technology executives. The geekiness of the group varies from people who leave their various device earpieces in their ears at *all* times to those who are always doing something on their laptops during the presentations (sometimes to augment the presentations and sometimes tuning them out altogether) to those who do not bring a laptop and take copious notes utilizing the hotel paper and pens provided. But still, these are people who work in technology and are attending a conference designed to talk about the future of technology.
Now, we have tried to have a "backchannel" on numerous occassions. We had a message board many eons ago, that was a total flop, we had to pose as posters and post stuff to make it look like people were posting. When Ray Ozzie first presented Groove to us at a session we all went and downloaded it and used it for approximately the rest of his talk and one talk after that, at which point everyone stopped. When Clay presented a workshop to us last year we ran simultaneous chat for the afternoon portion. Again, there was an initial period where people tried it but then they reverted back to nonuse. A concurrent experiment with a wiki got a tiny bit farther (in my opinion) mostly because 2-3 people in the room thought it was cool and took to it. Several notable bloggers have spoken at one point or another, and blogged from the conference, and hardly anyone followed their blogging or commented on it either in the blogs or during the conference itself.
We are a program which on the face of it should be all over technology-enabled backchannel conference communication. I'd have put money on it. But we don't seem to really want it. Why? Possible answers:
1) Our conferences encourage interaction and each table of 2 has a microphone. We don't need a backchannel because most of the backchannel has been redirected to the "front". Any leftover backchannel-ness is let out during our numerous food functions.
2) Our attendees, despite working in technology, aren't sufficiently into technology to want to adopt these new interaction methods. Or they are too busy trying to work and attend the conference and can't do this backchannel stuff because it requires too much attention and energy. Or they are shy. Or what they want to backchannel about is too darn snarky and career-killing for such public mixed company. In any event, it is something specific to the people attending my conference.
3) We just haven't found the right technological backchannel and given it enough time. (I do think we could make a wiki work and perhaps even work well, because it only needs a relatively small number of people into it and taking care of it to still be useful for all.)
4) We are just weird.
Clay, as always, makes convincing arguments. But I just haven't seen it play out in my real world situation.
~Maya
Permalink to Comment7. Clay Shirky on April 13, 2004 9:06 PM writes...
Andrew, I think we are talking past each other, because you are talking about conferees as audience, while I am talking about conferees as existing in a tension between audience and community. I think for you, anything that makes the attendees a worse audience makes the conference a worse conference, while for me, the question is one of net effect -- does the creation of new communal value outweigh the harm to the traditional conference form? (To which my answer is "Yes, sometimes.")
If doing anything disruptive is to be avoided, no one would ever get up to go to the bathroom, an obviously unworkable stricture. Once you admit that case, though, you are in a situation where the tension between two kinds of value -- receptive value from the talk vs personal value from opting out -- doesn't always resolve in favor of no disruption, and instead becomes a question of minimizing the disruption while balancing receptive and personal value.
As another example of that balance, we all understand that you can take an important call during a presentation, but that you should leave the room to do so.
The back-channel complicates matters by offering a third kind of value -- conversational value. Conversing with your peers, even if by typing, is in tension with receptive value. However, the value created in conversation can not only be higher than that in presentation, but unlike personal value, conversational value can actually be on topic.
From my point of view, it would be hard to view an interesting, signal-laden conversation during a content-poor presentation as a loss.
So the back-channel (provided it is used for on-topic conversation) raises a question that taking a phone call does not -- if it advances the goals of the participants in interacting with one another and discussing the topic at hand, does that make it more acceptable than behavior which is equally disruptive but off-topic?
My "yes, sometimes" is measured against thresholds of inclusivity, on-topic use, and politeness. From my point of view, the use of the irc channels at the Microsoft event passed the first test (barely) and the second test (easily), but we weren't polite enough (partly as a result of being kicked out of our own back-channel by an overzealous host, which raised the fuck'em quotient unduly.)
But that leaves me with a sense of needing more inclusiveness and more politeness, not less back-channel.
Permalink to Comment8. Seb Paquet on April 14, 2004 8:29 AM writes...
Clay's observations remind me somewhat of the principles that underlie Open Space gatherings. In an OS meeting, one of the core rules effectively obliterates the "group as audience" perspective. It is called the "Law of Two Feet" and is defined here:
href=http://www.openspaceworld.org/tmnfiles/2pageos.htm
"The Law of Two Feet means you take responsibility for what you care about -- standing up for that and using your own two feet to move to whatever place you can best contribute and/or learn."
What happens when the exclusive attention requirement is lifted is that the gathering becomes self-organized - smaller groups form and disband throughout the day according to each participant's decisions to stay or go.
As pointed out here - http://www.soil-water.org.au/forum-bin/readmsg/PMP_Forum2/91938548500 - that law is widely exercised on the internet through liberal clicking and scrolling.
In my mind the way wikis work feel closest to the OS model, as everyone goes where they can contribute while a sense of collective proximity remains because the wiki is a single, common space for the group.
(By the way, perhaps not coincidentally, an open space wiki exists at http://www.openspaceworld.org/wiki/wiki/wiki.cgi)
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