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People who pay lots of money (or their employer's money) to fly to a conference and then sit in the sessions tweeting or surfing the web as though it were a slo
by bithive123 14y ago
People who pay lots of money (or their employer's money) to fly to a conference and then sit in the sessions tweeting or surfing the web as though it were a slow day at the office are ultimately just impoverishing their own mind (like the people who don't have the patience to read books or who hate movies that don't do all the thinking for them).
They are only dimly aware of what's going on around them and shut out stimuli which they judge to be "boring" or "irrelevant to me" in favor of their familiar, unchallenging stimuli. It should be embarrassing, but somehow it's socially acceptable to be the equivalent of the guy who shows up to conference without doing the reading because he was playing WoW all night.
I went to RailsConf with a coworker like this and although I like her personally, she spent one of the more interesting sessions reading web comics and remarked "Wow, that was boring" afterwards. Well, yeah, you tuned out in the first 3 minutes.
- ScottWhigham 14y agoI don't get why people are downvoting this - anyone care to chime in as to what he said that was downvote-worthy?
- dfxm12 14y agoI assume it is being down voted because it is off topic. ...tweeting or surfing the web as though it were a slow day at the office (what the parent is talking about) is a very different thing from live-tweeting an event (what the article is talking about).
- bithive123 14y agoI don't see a substantial difference in tone between the article and my post. Instead of downvoting me, why not explain the difference between "tweeting" and "live-tweeting"? I don't see one there either; it seems like an attempt to avoid thinking critically about internet habits and I suspect the downvotes are more reflective of my comment hitting too close to home than it being off-topic.
- Karunamon 14y agoTweeting: Broadcasting messages on twitter. Live-tweeting (see also live-blogging): Broadcasting messages on twitter in directly relation to and following the goings-on of the event you're currently participating in . Livetweeting also has the ability to be a kind of note taking. If you've ever watched a live blog, it's the same concept, just with a shorter text field. If you haven't and have no idea of the concept, here's a recent one: http://live.cnet.com/Event/Googles_next_dimension_of_Maps_event?Page=0 http://live.cnet.com/Event/Googles_next_dimension_of_Maps_ev... -- Tweeting: Wow this conference is boring as heck, and the food sucks too #firstworldproblems Live-tweeting: Foonly just announced that the foomatic v2 will have high-speed backchannel integration! #foocon2012
- bithive123 14y agoI know what live tweeting is, I was inviting someone to explain how it is different from tweeting in terms of being an unnecessary distraction. With all the ways slides and videos and blog posts disseminate news following tech conferences I'm having trouble thinking of a less efficient way to do so than for dozens of people to be "live tweeting" nuggets from a talk 140 characters at a time. This is not twitter-bashing, I really feel that as a matter of basic decency and for their own intellectual growth audiences should be actively listening and making connections so that after the talk they can have something more interesting to say than "tl;dr". If you are so caught up in your initial reactions to a speaker that you pre-emptively distract yourself you are missing out on a lot of opportunities for insight into yourself and your community. I don't see the value in dozens of people flying to a city just to sit in hotel ballrooms and regurgitate things over the wifi.
- droidist 14y agoI know what you mean. It's kind of like when people pick out one thing you say and then spend the rest of the time formulating their response / waiting for their turn to speak and miss the rest of what you're saying. The conversation can turn out very tangential that way if they're bouncing off a very small piece of the surface of your overall point instead of the main meat of it.
- knowtheory 14y agoHaving live-tweeted the entirety of BackboneConf, I would like to object to a premise of your comment and the original post. Live-tweeting well is hard. It is not simply tuning out, or not focusing on the presentation. It's actually exactly the opposite. You have to listen intently and synthesize what a speaker is saying into succinct statements. Having done this 8 hrs a day for two days, I can tell you that it's about as mentally taxing a task as one can engage in (and i'm not saying that because i have a stake in whether live tweeting succeeds or not. I'm saying it because i wanted to find out how difficult it was to live-tweet an event, and I thought BackboneConf was a worthwhile event to disseminate to a wider audience).