Live blogging and live twittering, in my humblest opinion, are unnecessary. I can see why the idea is appealing. After all, you’re providing the first scoop as the event happens.
Here are a few reasons why I’m not too keen on the idea.
As a member of audience, my attention is diverted away from the speaker to everyone else’s laptop screens as they twitter or blog. Especially when you can’t help noticing a quite a few people are checking emails, working on a business card design, reading the news, etc. Clackity, clack, clack, clack, clackity, click, clack, click, spacebar, click, clack, tap, tap, tap all around you. It’s like hearing a cellphone conversation going on.
How can you pay attention to the presentation if you’re focusing on typing away? It’s also disrespectful to the presenter. “Am I that boring? Is my fly undone?”
Not that I’m telling you what to do (well, ok, I’m beseeching you), however, if you feel the need to live blog and twitter, I think it’s best to do so at the back of the room.
Live blogging and twittering gives you no time to reflect on the information presented. Good writing needs time to germinate. Not that I’m old skool, but I prefer writing in a notebook throughout the day and then blogging at night after the party’s over when I can provide my own thoughts on what I’ve learned. I don’t think you can really get that from quick bursts of sound bites put together from someone who didn’t pay full attention.
Live twittering becomes spam. Or at least bacn. A pet peeve I have is logging into Twitter to see full pages of tweets by the same 2 people giving me moment-by-moment updates on a conference they are at that I couldn’t care less about. The tweets make no sense. “Everyone hates the coffee”… “@someguy said something profound” so I go to his page hoping for a new person to follow who I could learn from but see a bunch of tweets about pizza… “technical troubles”… “someone offered their microphone”
Riveting.
I won’t remove the person from my following list because it’s too much hassle and I usually enjoy their tweets. It’s gotta be hard to make a proper judgment call on what’s worthy of a tweet when your full attention isn’t on the presentation.
The brain just isn’t capable of multitasking. It wasn’t made for it.
What are your thoughts on live blogging and twittering? Or for that matter, the clickity, clack, clack, spacebar, clack of notetaking on laptops (I am suddenly crotchety).
Do you like live blogging and twittering? I hope I haven’t offended anyone—it’s just that when I go to a presentation for the purpose of learning, I end up with all these distractions for the sake of using technology because they can. I don’t hate you, I just need to learn. I CRAVE EDUCATION!
Anywhoo, tell me your thoughts.