@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.

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.

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.