How to Present While People are Twittering

According to the article Tamar Weinberg posted on the webiste"Pistachio," a survey of leadership conferences show that people are communicating via blogs and twitter during conferences. Personally I beleive that in a way this method is better becasue now people don't have to whisper to each other, interrupting the speaker, however, people staring at their computers throughout the whole presentation is irrespectful to the speaker. You are at a conference to listen to someone very important speak, not to communicate with your laptops, you could do that later.

This leads into what Weinberg says about how the speaker has to adapt by speaking to what they call a "back channel," people looking at their computers instead of looking at the actual person speaking. How would a speaker adapt to this its my question. Why not instead, if people aren't going to pay direct attention to the speaker, conduct the conference via internet. in this way they can play with their computers as much as they can without irrespecting anybody.

The article shows how the back channel can be benefit from this and also how the speaker can get soemthing good out of this.

Benefits of the back channel inlcude; the audience gets more content, the audience can participate and innovate, you can conncet with people, you can do something else. This few benefits I pulled out from the article are what I beleive it's total crap. You don't need to connect with people during a live speaker presenting to you. You can easily have a blog of paper to jot down notes so you can creat and innovate, making it look more professional that having to stare at your laptop the whole conference. Beleive it or not the computer somehow will distract you even though you might not think it does.

On the other hand, benefits to the speaker include; typing means you're provoking interest, you'll get immediate feedback, they won't fall asleep. Again, I think this is crap. You can jot down notes on a sheet of paper, you could tape record the conference, many ways you could show you are interested instead of staring at your computer. The speaker won't get immediate feedback, they already have the presentation set up.