Listen Up! Or Whatever

In case anyone was really anxious to know, I will report that yes, I was Twittering a bit as well as blogging during the conference, and it was a fun extra way to know what was going on.

I find Twitter to be more of an amusing trifle than a key information stream on most days. I update if I think about it, read updates for people I follow, and am sometimes alerted to truly wonderful things like this music video of librarians and library school students at the University of Washington doing a search-related song set to the tune of Lady GaGa's "Poker Face." (Watch it. It is magnificent. I want to be making a music video at my library right now.) But it's not something I worry about catching up with if I forget to sign in for a week, so it's not one of my primary means of getting information.

I find it a bit more interesting, though, as a means of keeping track of a specific event. By reading posts with a certain theme, you get an interesting angle on what's happening and what people think about it.

How many people are commenting on that lecture? Oh, this person noticed that turn of phrase as well! I'm glad someone is updating on that topic, because I missed the first half of the presentation. 

So yes, when it's about something I'm interested in, I agree with a fairly broad array of others in finding Twitter a nifty tech tool with some nice application to conferences and meetings.

This reminds, me, to switch topics somewhat, that I was reading recently something to the effect that it must be unnerving for speakers to look out over a crowd and see a bunch of heads bent over laptops and phones, typing away.

And I guess it might be, if the speaker is really accustomed to seeing a bunch of people looking up in rapt attention, but really?--I don't see how someone typing away at a laptop is any more disturbing than someone scribbling away on a pad of paper.

And it's much less disturbing than someone chiseling away at a stone tablet, because you know that makes so much noise, and the rock dust makes other people in the audience sneeze, which is just distracting.

There's this sense that people are being less attentive if they're taking notes while listening, and sure, that's true since if you're doing anything other than gazing raptly your attention is probably divided, but it sometimes seems as if people find it especially inattentive to be working on a laptop, as opposed to writing on a napkin or something.

This may be because we don't trust people not to be playing solitaire or shopping on eBay on their computers, instead of actually taking notes. But really, we can't assume people industriously writing in notebooks aren't actually just drawing pictures of dragons eating cars, or playing "hangman" with themselves.

And even if someone is gazing at a speaker with an utterly fixed and to-all-appearances-rapt stare, they could actually be daydreaming about dragons eating cars, or decorating their bathrooms in their heads.

My general opinion is, there's no way to completely ensure that people will be paying attention to you, so you just figure it's up to them to either do it or not. In most situations in which I either speak or hear someone else speak, you have to assume everyone there is a grown up and can work it out for themselves, and if they're not inclined to be attentive, even tying their hands and propping their eyelids up with toothpicks will only go so far. (Although to be fair, that specific tactic would probably go pretty far, just based on novelty and horror.)

Whereas if they are inclined to pay attention, they'll often manage to do so, and the fact that they're typing busily away or sending text messages on their phones doesn't necessarily mean they think the speaker is boring or aren't listening. Possibly they're just trying to share the excitement, and/or capture the ideas for later.

Or possibly they're trying desperately to fight off albino trolls in a fantasy game and aren't listening at all. But that's their lookout, right?

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