I've attended a few conferences lately, which have been the first "lecture"-like settings I've been in since graduating in 2007. The extent to which fellow atte

I've attended a few conferences lately, which have been the first "lecture"-like settings I've been in since graduating in 2007. The extent to which fellow attendees felt the need to constantly mess around on laptops and smartphones during presentations was dismaying and struck me as rather disrespectful. The conference organisers even seemed to encourage this by bleating on about twitter hashtags whenever they got the chance, and having live twitter searches full of vacuous banter distractingly projected as a peer to the presenter's slides. Honestly, I thought I had a problem with attention deficit, but maybe I ain't seen nothing yet.