DAC Panels and Back Channels
Posted by rick jamison on August 5th, 2009
Have you attended a keynote presentation or panel discussion lately? If so, you’re probably aware of the emergence of the so-called “Back Channel” – the real-time Twitter-enabled discourse that is becoming increasingly popular among conference attendees.
The concept is simple: anyone with a Twitter account and an Internet-connected device (BlackBerry, iPhone, laptop, etc.) can tweet freely from any location at any given moment. If that location happens to be a seat in the audience at a trade show event, comments from the stage or observations about the event itself can (and often do) appear instantly in the worldwide Twitter stream.
This phenomenon is described in more detail in a blog post titled How to Present While People are Twittering. The back channel offers “huge benefits to the individual members of the audience and to the overall output of a conference or meeting,” says presentations and speaking expert Olivia Mitchell, including 1) Twitter helps audience members focus, 2) the audience gets more content, 3) audience members can get questions answered on the fly, and 4) the audience can innovate as well as participate.
All well and good. But what does it mean to “participate?” Beyond the ability to interact and join the conversation, participation can also include the power to form an opinion or make an assessment (about the speakers, the topic, or anything else that crosses one’s mind) and instantly share that perspective with the person three rows over and five rows back – and everyone else in the room half listening while monitoring their email and social media feeds of choice.
Such was the case at the Futures for EDA: the CEO View event at the recent Design Automation Conference (#46dac). As questions were presented to the CEO panelists (Aart de Geus, Wally Rhines and Lip-Bu Tan) by Juan-Antonio Carballo of IBM, an audience member tweeted that “the whole thing was canned” and thereby initiated a rumor that developed traction and began spreading through the audience as the event was actively underway.
The rumor, as it turns out, was completely false. So says Andrew B. Kahng (General Chair, 46th DAC) who personally fielded the questions presented to the panelists from the following sources: four were pre-agreed and originated from the EDA companies themselves, one was pre-agreed and originated from Juan-Antonio, two were pre-agreed and originated from a web survey and seven questions were text-messaged real-time during the panel discussion.
All the world’s a stage and false rumors come and go. On the other hand, to the extent that this event contributed something positive to the health and self-understanding of the industry, the erroneous Twitter chatter was an unfortunate distraction to DAC organizers, panelists and audience members alike.
Like all things social media, instant reach and visibility are powerful commodities that come wrapped in a bunch of interesting questions.
Do people who create content on Twitter and other social media platforms have a responsibility to check facts or confirm their beliefs before blasting them around the world? As a speaker or panelist, how does an increasingly Internet-connected audience influence the way you think about presenting content from a stage? (You sure can’t stop it or control it.) As a content consumer, how do you decide what to read and whom you can trust?
What do you think?
RSS
For conferences like DAC I prefer to write up my thoughts as a full blog post, then use Twitter to link to my full post.
At DAC this year it was hilarious to read one journalist use twitter during sessions with shortened words that only cell-phone text geeks would comprehend. No thank you, just link to a real article that I can actually enjoy.
My feeling is that people who continue to post falsehoods on Twitter or elsewhere will lose credibility. Their posts won’t be trusted and their voice won’t be heard. It’s a self-correcting feature of the way we communicate with new media.
Karen,
It would be cool to add an eBay-like community feature where I can provide an up or down vote on a blogger.