Network weather
These notes are part of a series for the book.
One really interesting thing about this chapter is the way it is written. The author is a proponent of open, digital scholarship but he does not hold back in showing the other side of the argument by way of specific examples. This starts even with the chapter title, which references a metaphor used in a blog post by a man named Adam Greenfield. Greenfield wrote that technologies affect us even if we do not use them, and he called this “network weather”. (Greenfield says on his blog’s About page that he does not have a Facebook or Twitter account, preferring email instead.) The chapter then goes on to look at how social media is changing academic conferences.
Outline
- Network weather
- Remote participation
- Backchannel
- Amplified events
- Socialization
- Changing formats
- Case study: The Open University conference
- Conclusion
Notes
Remote participation
People now can participate in conferences remotely via Twitter hashtags, blogs, live-streaming video, and shared slides and photos. This extends the conversation to a greater number of people and across a larger timeframe. The experience is not as good for these remote participants as attending the conference in person, but it is cheaper and easier for them to fit into their schedule and they are still able to reap some benefits from it — some being quite a bit better than none. Conference organizers try different things to make best use of this new remote participation, by seeking comments from participants, offering virtual streams to complement the main conference, analyzing data from the remote participation, and using it for event promotion.
Backchannels
This is basically when conference attendees have conversations via Twitter or Facebook during a conference talk. This extends the conversation to people while not requiring them to know, or even meet, each other.
Counterpoint: Weller gives a quote from danah boyd about a time when this turned out horribly for her. She was the keynote speaker at a really important conference. They shined a bright light in her face so she could not see the audience, didn’t give her access to a computer, and then they projected a twitter feed behind her as she gave her speech. The participants of this backchannel — her audience — started in with comments that sexually objectified her and making other snarky remarks and the audience spent the duration of her speech reading and composing tweets that mocked her instead of listening to what she had to say. Ironically enough, the speech they missed out on was titled ‘Streams of Content, Limited Attention’.
Amplified events
This is when conference organizers try to include more remote participation. For example, they may have:
- Recordings of the presentations
- Discussion forums
- Flickr photo feeds
- Blog posts
- Slides publicly posted
New formats
Some other things conference organizers are trying out are different formats for conferences. For example, they may have virtual events interwoven with the physical conference, style a conference to be mostly participatory workshops that is shared via social media, or leave the conference agenda undetermined until the day of the conference when it is decided on the spot by the attendees and presentations lasting 2 or 7 minutes are given.