{"id":11486,"date":"2012-08-17T10:32:49","date_gmt":"2012-08-17T14:32:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/?p=11486"},"modified":"2012-08-27T15:16:40","modified_gmt":"2012-08-27T19:16:40","slug":"twitter-isnt-a-backchannel-asa2012","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/2012\/08\/17\/twitter-isnt-a-backchannel-asa2012\/","title":{"rendered":"Twitter isn\u2019t a Backchannel (#ASA2012)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Bodies and screens, voices and tweets, hallways and backchannels,\u00a0experiencing\u00a0the American Sociological\u00a0Association\u00a0meetings\u00a0this weekend in Denver means stepping into an atmosphere oversaturated with information. The bombardment can sometimes be overwhelming, with more sessions<\/a> than you can attend and more tweets<\/a> than you can read. This isn\u2019t going to be a post on why we should use Twitter at conferences, Whitney Erin Boesel already did that<\/a> more diplomaticly than I could pull off. Anyways, framing it as ‘why do we continue to meet face-to-face?’ would be more interesting for me. Instead, I simply want to argue that there will not be separate online and offline conferences happening<\/em>, that Twitter isn\u2019t a backchannel and the session room isn\u2019t the front. The reality of the conference is always<\/em> both digital and physical for everyone<\/em> whether their noses are buried in a screen, sheets of paper, or staring unblinkingly at the podium.<\/p>\n

One of my favorite conference activities is watching how people sift through this information-saturated environment. Notice their various comportments: some sitting, watching, listening with paper and pen, others clutching a glowing screen. Some are hand-high asking questions out loud, others are tapping angrily at a keyboard. Some are checking Facebook, others in that place between awake and asleep. This is the conference, individuals and their relative position to creating and consuming (i.e., prosuming<\/a>)\u00a0the surrounding\u00a0atmosphere\u00a0of information, be it analogue or digital.<\/p>\n

There is no \u201cback<\/em>channel\u201d, there is no more or less \u201creal\u201d way to exist within this atmosphere of information, yet we continue to hear that the Twitter distraction whisks people away from the \u201creal\u201d conference in favor of something separate and \u201cvirtual.\u201d Each time we say \u201creal\u201d or \u201cIRL\u201d (“in real life”) to mean offline, we reify the digital dualist<\/a> myth of a separate digital layer \u201cout there\u201d in some \u2018cyber\u2019 space. And when we call Twitter a \u201cbackchannel\u201d to mean a separate conversation, running tangent to the offline conference in some space behind<\/em> precious face-to-face exchanges, we continue to support this digital dualism. The implicit, and incorrect, assumption is that the on and offline are zero-sum, that being offline means being not online, and vice versa<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Instead, the atmosphere of information is always<\/em>\u00a0at once analogue and digital, and we exist within it, always<\/em> both on and offline. The idea of a back<\/em>channel is the fantasy of some\u00a0Matrix-like informationscape untethered by material realty, similar to the complementary fantasy of some purely offline front-channel, some natural habitat untouched by digital\u00a0contaminants. You can refuse to carry a phone, ignore all screens, and boast to everyone who will listen how old-school you are with your pencil and leather-bound notebook, but you still have not<\/em> opted out of Twitter or the\u00a0mislabeled\u00a0\u201cbackchannel.\u201d Akin to what I argued in The IRL Fetish<\/em><\/a> essay, those who proudly fetishize their analogue resistance to digital distraction are still experiencing an augmented conference and are still deeply influenced by what happens online. In fact, they are often less-prepared to understand the nature of that influence.<\/p>\n

That said, it remains important to differentiate between information, as it travels fluidly on and offline, that is coming at us from bodies or tweets, paper or pixels. Just as the person neglecting information in its digital form is less-prepared, equally\u00a0problematic\u00a0is the logic that being always more deeply digitally connected is a good thing. Neglecting what is happening face-to-face in favor of the backlit action on your screen can be a mistake. Conversational nuances, room dynamics, and of course, undistracted attention to the speaker are all important conference skills. The question should never have been \u2018is Twitter good or bad?\u2019 but how to best arrange your digital and analogue inputs and outputs in real-time. Always tuning out the room or Twitter are both failed conference strategies.<\/p>\n

If we can acknowledge that the conference is both information and people who are always\u00a0simultaneously\u00a0on and offline, we\u2019ll be much better prepared to prosume\u00a0this information environment. We can stop fetishizing both \u201crevolutionary cyberspace!\u201d as well as pure physical co-presence. It means no one is fully offline. It means there is no such thing as a front or back channel. It means we need to stop saying real and “IRL” to mean offline and “virtual” to mean online. The ASA IRL is Twitter, too. Remember that claims to what is \u201creal\u201d are always claims to knowledge and thus power; it is not insignificant that \u201creal\u201d and \u201ctrue\u201d have nearly the same antonym.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The ASA IRL is Twitter, too<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":559,"featured_media":11489,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[18375,9967],"tags":[374,18370,2324,18377,10409,10602,18376,10447,942,16155,2954,732,175,66,184],"class_list":["post-11486","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-asa2012-2","category-commentary","tag-asa","tag-asa2012","tag-augmented-reality","tag-backchannel","tag-conference","tag-conferences","tag-denver","tag-digital-dualism","tag-facebook","tag-irl-fetish","tag-jurgenson","tag-social-media","tag-sociology","tag-theory","tag-twitter"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/files\/2012\/08\/DSC_0002.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11486","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/559"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11486"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11486\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11492,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11486\/revisions\/11492"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11489"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11486"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11486"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11486"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}