Any sufficiently large number of signals is indistinguishable from noise. I suspect this principle does not figure prominently in the consciousness of people who are live-tweeting from conferences or other physical world events, or participating in purely virtual tweet chats. I have filtered and even unfollowed several friends who have gone on live-tweeting or tweet chatting binges, as I do not care to have my main Twitter feed consumed by tweets from events I do not care about.
A tweet today from Alyssa Royse suggests I am not alone in this irritation regarding Twitter etiquette:
All of my blocked hashtags end in "con." Time for conferences to rethink how they ask people to use Twitter.
— alyssaroyse (@alyssaroyse) November 9, 2013
Although I do not physically attend many conferences or other tweet-worthy events these days, when I do, I have adopted a practice that others may find useful. I use the @reply mechanism to reference the event Twitter handle at the start of the tweet – which hides the tweet from anyone who does not follow both me and the event – and then use the designated event hashtag so that anyone who is explicitly following the event hashtag can also see it. Others may remain blissfuly unaware of my avid participation in and live transcription of the event highlights.
As an example, the last conference I physically attended was the ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW 2012), last February. I tweeted a number of highlights from the conference, but preceded most of them with the Twitter handle for the conference (@acm_cscw2012) and used the designated Twitter hashtag (#cscw2012), e.g.,
@acm_cscw Notion that high-impact publications determine who gets academic jobs, grants & tenure is wrong http://t.co/aKurDbYC #cscw2012
— Joe McCarthy (@gumption) February 23, 2012
The only people who would see this tweet are those who are following both me (@gumption) and @acm_cscw or those who are following the #cscw2012 hashtag on Twitter.
Now, I do make exceptions for exceptional insights and observations that I believe may be of general interest beyond those who are at or interested in the conference, e.g.,
Researcher Decodes Workplace Rank From Emails @eegilbert interview @npr based on #cscw2012 paper http://t.co/ziXqpzS3
— Joe McCarthy (@gumption) February 20, 2012
But generally speaking, I try to maintain a small footprint for my live-tweeting … and I would like to encourage others to adopt a similar practice.
[Oops – forgot about tweet chats …probably because I do not participate in them. Briefly, a tweet chat is a period (typically an hour) during which a moderator will post a series of questions or prompts, and then others post responses to that question, all using a designated hashtag. A similar practice can be adopted in such scenarios, in which respondents direct their responses to the moderator (or the person who posted the question) using @replies.]
Comments
2 responses to “A modest proposal: use @replies and hashtags for live-tweeting and tweet chats”
Hallelujah! I’m relieved to know I’m not alone in my teeth-clenching reaction to all that “live-tweeting or tweet chatting binge” behaviour out there.
From the speaker’s perspective onstage, it’s also extremely distracting to look out at a sea of audience members, many of whom are not making even the slightest attempt at looking at the speaker because they’re frantically live-tweeting the event, eyes cast downward throughout.
And so much of the resulting conference “coverage” is unusable, indecephirable and even downright boring – unless there’s a live link included. And don’t get me started on the avalanche of inane “Hey JJC are you here let’s meet for drinks before dinner” tweets that go on during a conference . . .
Thanks for this useful bit of practical sanity-saving advice.
@carolyn:Thanks for confirming that others feel the pain, and for introducing the perspective of a conference speaker into the equation.
A few years ago, I posted a related rant about the dark side of digital backchannels in shared physical spaces, in reaction to danah boyd’s reaction to having conference hashtag tweets posted on a screen behind her while she was giving a presentation, which proved to be rather disruptive.
I believe we can all benefit from the more judicious use of shared resources, digital & physical.