dreadedmonkeygod . net

Danah Boyd wants her cyborg lifestyle, and has written excellently in defence of multichannel communication in the real world.

My colleagues interrupt the talk with questions. (One admits that he asks questions because he's more interested in talking to the speaker than listening... he also asks questions to stay awake.) I find the interruptions to the speaker to be weirdly inappropriate. I much much prefer to ask questions to Twitter, Wikipedia, and IRC/IM. Let the speaker do her/his thing... let me talk with the audience who is present and those who are not but might have thoughtful feedback.

I've attended two major technical conferences in the last few years. On both occasions, I expected every speaker to start their talk by pointing to the main screen and saying, "There's the info for backchannels. Post questions to Twitter tagged with #jdktalk or to the IRC channel you see there."

At AJAX World and Endeca Discover, none of the speakers provided a way for the audience to integrate with the proceedings beyond raising their hand or squeezing in a Q&A session at the end.

I'm fully down with the power of focusing all your attention on one thing for a length of time. Setting my phone to go straight to voicemail, turning Skype and Outlook off, and going full throttle for three hours is How Stuff Gets Done.

But that concentration on "one thing" often involves many different input and output streams. Unless I'm exceptionally well-versed in the contextual material, and unless the speaker is really engaging, just sitting and listening to a lecture seems like downgrading to dialup.