A private dread of speaking in public

[koganbot]

Alison Macleod (Wisdom of Mobs: the feedback loop): Thought three: danah boyd's unpleasant experience of presenting against an increasingly hostile Twitter backstream. danah boyd is a greatly-respected internet researcher with a private dread of speaking in public. She gave her presentation against a large-screen backdrop of live Twitter updates, which the Twittering audience then used to criticise her. Up front and behind her back, all at the same time.

The internet allows us to feed back our enjoyment, our heartfelt disapproval and even our bitchy private comments. But on the other side, what do we (as receivers of the feedback) do with it? Is all of it The Truth™? Do we throw it out because the feedback is not representative (they're not Daily Mail readers, they’re not true fans)? Do we congratulate ourselves on the upswing in page views?

The thing about feedback of this kind is that it's really not a conversation. It can be a tennis match, or out-and-out war, but there's typically little conversation. The danah boyd example shows what happens when feedback is so close and unregulated that it changes the very nature of the act.

Thought I'd post this while it's hot, though for the next couple of days I'm going to be thinking less about this and more about my year's-end and decade's-end lists. But my intuition here would be to at least temporarily move the conversation away from discussing new media and new methods of feedback loops and start with my contention that the people in my music-crit world who want to have a conversation don't know how to do so, at least don't know how to sustain an intellectual conversation. Which is to say we don't know how to be intellectuals. This was as true in '87 as it is now.

Btw, if you click the Boyd link you'll see from her own description that a good deal of the problem during her presentation was simply that no one in the room took any responsibility for the event, so no one was willing to stand up and say, "Danah, you're speaking too quickly and we're having trouble understanding you." This falls into the category "Don't know how to have a conversation," in this case, "Won't take responsibility for the conversation."

Also, Macleod and Boyd are both people I might want to pull into our conversation, and I might want to join theirs. Looking through her archives I saw that Macleod had once dipped her toe into a discussion of paradigms and that she had something to say but didn't really know what she was talking about, and I'm someone who could have helped her, assuming she wanted the help. Tom has been recommending Boyd: she's the one who's been pointing out that there's a difference in social class between who uses MySpace and who uses Facebook.

Comments

OH MY FUR AND WHISKERS <-- as per usual

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

Against "don't know how to", I'd also set:

i: don't have well-designated time to...
ii: don't know how to find or fashion a context in which to...
iii. think and say they want to but actually really possibly don't want to...

Has the conversation we're hunting for ever actually genuinely existed elsewhere? And if it has -- let's say for the sake of argument in the evolution of mathematics at various times -- has it ever simultaneously existed as an all-access drama in real time? (Which is a characteristic we seem to be requiring of it in our search...)

Re: OH MY FUR AND WHISKERS <-- as per usual

[koganbot]

i. I think the answer lies somewhere between "If we want to we'll find a way" and "Oh noes, we can't do it without institutional support" (Xgau's comment back in WMS #4 about the late '80s lacking the socioeconomic "slack" of the '60s might be relevant here; marginal lumpen intellectuals need something to feed off of (though I don't know if Xgau's decade examples are right, and I thought it was strange that in 1988 Xgau believed the pressure to earn a living was the most severe since the Great Depression, given that early '80s and early '70s had been worse)), but I lean strongly towards "If they want to they'll find a way"
ii. This is probably the crux, though...
iii. ...this is of course a big problem but...
iii.a. ...while some people simply lack the skill and never will get it, I think others who currently lack the skill have never seen it modeled for them, or anyway haven't connected to the model or seen intellectual exertion and interchange as potentially fun

[I'm bracketing the "all-access drama in real time" question for the time being, along with the "new media" question, though I certainly think that open-access and real-time can be tools for overcoming built-in flaws of academia. ("Open access" and "real time" are actually two independent characteristics; notice that I changed the terminology from "all access" to "open access," the latter being a better way to express the idea of, say, the Department Of Dilettante Research's existing in an open space; e.g., a discussion taking place in English can be open access but in practice it's not all access, since it will likely exclude people who don't know English.) A discussion would certainly point to successful communication, or creative miscommunication, rather than concentrating on failure, but the question would be how to extrapolate from the successes.]

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

I think the first step here is to post a response in her comment thread! danah probably gets too many commenters for even the most articulate or engaging comment not to register to some extent as "noise," but there's only two on the original post over at "Wisdom of Mobs"!