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November 27, 2004
digital backchannels
Posted by danah boyd
At CSCW earlier this month, Joe McCarthy and i organized a panel called Digital Backchannels in Shared Physical Spaces (of which Liz was a panelist). In the panel, we discussed a variety of different pedagogical and cognitive issues, research directions and tools for enabling digital backchanneling in the classroom, at conferences and in other shared physical spaces. This was the first year that CSCW had blanketed wireless access so many of the attendees witnessed backchannels in conferences for the first time. For me, this was a great opportunity to bring a discussion topic from the tech space into the academic sphere.
Based on this panel, USA Today wrote a story called Digital note-passing gains respect among adults, covering aspects of the panel.
This article made me wonder - does anyone know who coined the term “digital backchannel” (since i know it wasn’t us)?
Comments (4)
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1. phil jones on November 27, 2004 6:11 PM writes...
I don't suppose the term "digital backchannels" will be around for very long anyway. It's particularly clunky.
Permalink to Comment2. peterme on November 28, 2004 2:22 PM writes...
I can't find references to "digital backchannel," but there are plenty of references to "back channel," "backchannel," and "back-channel" (minus "digital") that deal with this phenomenon.
The earliest I could find is a capture of an IRC chat, where someone refers to an IRC backchannel:
http://london.pm.org/~jo/foaf/2003-03-16.html
(Ctrl-F on "IRC backchannel").
The earliest blog reference to this I can find is:
http://www.tmttlt.com/archives/2003/07/05/854/
Which just barely beats the Supernova discussion:
http://www.corante.com/bottomline/20030701.shtml#43767
And it was this NY Times article that seems to have popularized the phrase:
Permalink to Commenthttp://tech2.nytimes.com/mem/technology/techreview.html?res=980DE1D7153FF937A15754C0A9659C8B63
3. Seb on November 28, 2004 8:46 PM writes...
There was an interesting discussion of the term a few months back on Shelley Powers' site: http://weblog.burningbird.net/archives/2004/04/06/linguistic-correction-on-backchanneling
Permalink to Comment4. zephoria on November 28, 2004 8:49 PM writes...
::nod:: I've known about the reference in linguistics for some time. This is why we used digital backchannel instead, making a particular reference to a set of practices available technologically not simply cognitively.
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