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A private dread of speaking in public
Dec. 29th, 2009 07:52 amAlison 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.
( Recommending Macleod and Boyd )
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.
( Recommending Macleod and Boyd )
