Backchat, some thoughts
Having penned a short definition of ‘the backchannel’ for December’s Wired UK (see subsequent celebratory arm-flailing), it was with a tightening stomach that I read this blog post from web researcher danah boyd:
“… I walked off stage and immediately went to Brady and asked what on earth was happening. And he gave me a brief rundown. The Twitter stream was initially upset that I was talking too fast. My first response to this was: OMG, seriously? That was it? Cuz that’s not how I read the situation on stage. So rather than getting through to me that I should slow down, I was hearing the audience as saying that I sucked. And responding the exact opposite way the audience wanted me to. This pushed the audience to actually start critiquing me in the way that I was imagining it was …”
An interesting discussion of the way an audience can rapidly become a mob, in all it’s pitchfork-waving, windmill-burning glory – full kudos to danah for being so open and honest about the whole thing. There’s also something interesting (and faintly disturbing) about the journalistic/political side of this.
See: Trafigura & Carter-Ruck, Stephen Fry.
And then there’s this from Chairman Bruce, in conversation with Dunne & Raby (and courtesy of of Icon 078) :
“If you were a science fiction writer and you were reading, say, Scientific American you would have at least an 18-month lead over the general population in which you could write a story about something in a laboratory and it would appear in a pulp magazine and people would read it and they’d be surprised by it because they’d never heard of it. That is not possible [any more], the sluggishness that allowed that particular set of reactions is just not there. I mean now if I blog something that’s going on in somebody’s lab I’m going to get an email from the guy: “Ah, Mr Sterling, thank you for putting my photon experiment on wired.com, would you like to meet my photon friends? I see you’re in London today, how about dropping by the pub.” This is a small foretaste of the kind of trouble we’re getting into.”
At this point, some appropriate footage from the BBC Digital Revolution rushes, from (the newly en-PhDed) Aleks Krotoski’s ‘virtual communities’ interview with Howard Rheingold:
I’m (always) on Twitter, and – as a medium – it’s made my experience of the world a lot ‘thinner’, for want of a better word. It’s given me partial access to lots of people and areas of interest that would have otherwise remained strictly off-limits. This might be because I got in early, at the point where a relatively small, tech-literate user base were more willing to engage with strangers, and the ‘thinness’ phenomena is something I’ve also experienced (though to a far lesser extent) with other media and social networks – bulletin boards, newsgroups, email, Facebook.
But is Twitter a Rheingoldian (?) ‘virtual community‘ in the same way as something like the WELL or a World of Warcraft guild? I’m not really sure – the affordances of the technology seem to favour the individual at the expense of any kind of inchoate collective. It’s lots of relationships happening simultaneously in the same space, but there’s no real distinct group identity. Here, a logic of radical individualism combines with a sense of transience to encourage behaviours that – as with the boyd case – simply wouldn’t wash elsewhere. There’s an acceleration of discourse; a qualitative, structural change which Sterling sees as a major challenge to science fiction authors attempting to evoke a sense of wonder from an audience of readers who will have read the same things, and may even be able to reverse-engineer the initial ingredients from the final published work. And that’s after the writing (authoring?) process is complete!
See: Node Magazine, a hypertext annotation of William Gibson’s 2007 novel Spook Country.
As a Twitter user, it’s easy to feel abstracted from your words: words which either fade to dust or take on a life of their own, re-tweeted by others. A slip of the tongue, an impulsive comment, and – like Fry – you find yourself as the prisoner of your own (digitised) tongue.
Oy – I still have my early edition of “Virtual Communities” somewhere in post-move boxes.
I don’t think Twitter necessarily functions as a Rheingoldian Community, though, unless you work to make it so. Twitter is starting to try to give you the tools to do this – lists being the obvious one – in a way which mirrors the groups function Ludicorp put into Flickr pretty early on.
(Also, by building typographic cues into communications, there’s an interesting fail potential – Livejournal is good for this, because it gave the impression of secure communication in a basically insecure (socially rather than technically) environment. Social media consultants tend to overlook LiveJournal as they do MySpace, but it’s the forge of a lot of the nuts and bolts screwed into the successor brands.
And, to bring this back to Stephen Fry, as every conversation involving Twitter must be brought, LiveJournal also shares with Twitter the encouragement of asymmetry. You, Justin Pickard, can have 200,000 followers and follow 100 people. I can have 100 followers and follow 2,000, and our experiences differ only in the churn rate of our Tweetdecks, until I say something that pisses you off. Fry’s interventions on Trafigura and Jan Moir really just told us what we already know, that Fry is one of Twitter’s bigger broadcast relays. More intriguing was the Brumplums blowout – simple soap opera on one level, but also a demonstration that you can create large, single-shot communities on Twitter based around a single objective, and that objective can be another Twitter user (back to Danah Boyd, to an extent). The article you linked to has Fry talking about his feelings, and how he is not thick-skinned enough to deal with negative comments, but he is, ultimately, still a multi-millionaire who can pretty much on demand get a _lot_ of affirmation. If you’re a chap in Birmingham who is such a digital native that he has pictures of his old chap on his thinly pseudonymous blog, you don’t have that padding, so it’s something of a cold shower when Jonathan Creek appears to be encouraging people to burn your house down.
That community bubbles up around that shared concern or context, and then bubbles down into quiescence afterwards, the decline trackable by the occurrence of hashtags and mentions over time. But is there a permanence – say, a critically massy community of people, gaining or losing constantly at the edges, who are constantly engaged in talking to our about Stephen Fry? Probably yes, but the same continuity doesn’t hold with Trafigura or Jan Moir.
@Tim – I like the idea that our current understanding of ‘the rules of communication’ are a product of culture and history. The Shakespeare example really highlights the contingency of our current expectations. Also, I think I have a problem with audiences: really dislike the Q bit of the Q&A presentation format.
@Dan – I think I prefer the idea of Fry-as-telephone-exchange than Fry-as-Sun-King-of-Twitter. Just wish journalists would stop quoting him verbatim, and framing it as “news”!
The transient, ad-hocratic nature of these event-driven #hashtag communities is something I find fascinating. There’s a book on the subject by Cliff Atkinson coming out just after Christmas, which should – hopefully – kick-start some kind of broader discussion.
Not sure how relevant it’ll be or if you’ve already read it but I’ve just finished Hubert Dreyfus’ On the Internet – would be interested to see what you think especially about chapter 5 (you want the second edition though, with the stuff about Second Life in it).
[...] Twitter and Virtual Communities Thanks to Justin Pickard for the following mention: There’s an acceleration of discourse; a qualitative, structural change which Sterling sees as a [...]
This is more or less what I posted on Boyd’s blog.
Her reminded me of grade school descriptions of what it was like to see a play in Shakespeare’s time. The stage is thrust out and surrounded on three sides, it feels more like a ball game in the audience, people are selling snacks and talking to one another. Part of why his characters have to repeat plot points so often is that the actors were essentially shouting over the audience all the time.
We’ve since tamed that beast and now talking or using your cellphone or any number of things that might distract from the performance is considered unbelievably rude in most circles. So plays, movies, and talks have tended to get a reasonably respectful audience.
Livestreaming Twitter feeds is seductive. It’s audience participation! But silent and – unlike heckling – non-disruptive, right? Well, as your experience here shows: no, not at all. It can be extremely disruptive.
I think it’s possible for speakers to adapt to this kind of thing. If a bunch of the other material condition of her talk hadn’t been so bad, if – as she says – she’d chosen a more rehearsed set of points, if, if, if.
Shakespeare’s actors managed to get through Hamlet with all the shouting. I’m sure a key skill they all learned was getting the audience on side.
But she’s not the only person who has trouble speaking in public and if we raise the bar for what kind of skills and conditions need to be in place for a talk to go well, we end up with an environment where fewer people can give good talks. This is the opposite of what I want from the world.
I love Twitter. I use it heavily every day. But I’ve been to a number of conferences and I’ve yet to see one where having random de-synced-from-the-talk heckles and asides have improved the quality of the presentation or of my experience.
The last bit of her post boils down to, “Hey everyone, maybe let’s treat one another like decent human beings?” Sometimes it feels like we have to relearn that with every new social tool.