{"id":16518,"date":"2013-08-16T18:58:31","date_gmt":"2013-08-16T22:58:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/?p=16518"},"modified":"2013-08-17T01:29:11","modified_gmt":"2013-08-17T05:29:11","slug":"twitter-still-isnt-a-backchannel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/2013\/08\/16\/twitter-still-isnt-a-backchannel\/","title":{"rendered":"Twitter Still Isn’t A Backchannel"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"asa-2013\"<\/a>During the 2013 Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association<\/a>\u00a0(#ASA13<\/a>) in New York this last week, I was reminded of the post that I wrote last year before\u00a0#ASA2012<\/a> in which I encouraged tweeting academics to reach out<\/a> to non-tweeting academics to bridge the gap between those who participate on the conference hashtags at ASA and those who don\u2019t. Nathan Jurgenson (@nathanjurgenson<\/a>) followed up with a post titled, \u201cTwitter isn\u2019t a Backchannel<\/a>,\u201d in which he made the point that the term \u201cbackchannel\u201d perpetuates digital dualist ideas of what does and doesn\u2019t count as \u201creal\u201d participation at a conference:<\/p>\n

There is no \u201cbackchannel\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 (\u201cin real life\u201d) 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 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In the comments, I agreed that Nathan had a point: \u201cbackchannel\u201d really isn\u2019t a great term<\/a> for what we-who-livetweet do when we tweet at a conference. But what, I asked, should we call this activity? Neither Nathan nor I had an answer at the time, and I was still looking for a term<\/a> when I wrote my ASA 2012 wrap-up post. But sometime in between post-ASA 2012 and when the\u00a0Theorizing the Web<\/a> planning committee<\/a> was getting together to plan\u00a0#TtW13<\/a>, I\u2019d come to a conclusion\u2014and was solidly of an opinion that we should call the people moderating hashtag discussions for the TtW sessions \u201chashtag moderators\u201d rather than \u201cbackchannel moderators\u201d (which we did<\/a>; needless to say, the term change was not a hard sell).<\/p>\n

Revisiting my old post this week (and wincing a little for each use of the word “backchannel”) reminded me, however, that I never got around to posting about my proposed (and now, adopted) term change, so here we go: If we want to talk about that thing that happens when people who are in-room and people who are elsewhere use Twitter to have a conversation about a talk, a presentation, or some other event, that thing isn\u2019t a backchannel; it\u2019s a hashtag stream.<\/p>\n

Again: It is not a backchannel; it is a hashtag stream.<\/strong><\/p>\n

You are not a backchannel moderator; you are a hashtag moderator.<\/p>\n

You are not backchanneling; you are participating on the hashtag (possibly by livetweeting).<\/p>\n

Granted, \u201cparticipating on the hashtag\u201d is more of a mouthful than \u201cbackchanneling\u201d\u2014so perhaps we could shorten this to \u201chashtagging,\u201d and understand that term to mean \u201cparticipating on the conference hashtag\u201d in the context of a conference; alternatively, if we’re going to rely on context in that way, perhaps we could simply say “tweeting.” (I’m interested to hear people’s thoughts on this.) But there you have it: some workable language for talking about using Twitter at academic conferences. We need not denigrate hashtag participation as “backchanneling” again.<\/p>\n

Other than that\u2014on the topic of Twitter and ASA, and in the spirit of revisiting my post from last year\u2014is there anything else I want to add, now that I\u2019ve been to two ASA meetings instead of none? I have a few thoughts:<\/p>\n

\"bored\"<\/a>
Sometimes session rooms were almost this empty. It was weird.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

1.) This year\u2019s ASA felt off to me, in a way that I couldn\u2019t quite put my finger on. Perhaps it was because the conference started on a Saturday and ended on a Tuesday, which meant that there were more people around for the first half than for the second half, which in turn created a sense that momentum was dwindling rather than building; perhaps it was the number of people I know who weren’t able to make it this year (or who only stayed for a day or two), in part because staying in New York can be so expensive; perhaps it was the number of scheduling conflicts for CITASA<\/a> sessions & other sessions CITASA folks were likely to find interesting (CITASA is the Communication and Information Technology section of the American Sociological Association). But in any case, the Internet-studies \u201cscene\u201d felt far less cohesive and energized at #ASA13 than it did last year at #ASA2012 in Denver. Unsurprisingly (at least, to me)\u2014because again, Twitter isn\u2019t a \u201cbackchannel\u201d\u2014the listlessness this year manifested across in-room experiences, the session hashtags, and the general conference hashtag. Rooms for many of the Internet-related sessions were strangely empty (a thematic session titled, “Studying Social Dynamics in the Digital Age<\/a>” was the most obvious exception, though for some unfathomable reason it was scheduled at the same time as a CITASA “Open Topic on Communication, Technology, and Society<\/a>” session panel), and tweets about Internet-related sessions seemed to make up a much smaller percentage of the general ASA stream this year than last. More often than not, I was one of fewer than three or four people tweeting on a session hashtag, and on at least one occasion, I was the only person tweeting on a session hashtag. At times, this felt strange to the point of being a little eerie.<\/p>\n

2.) I did notice more people using session hashtags<\/a> in addition to the regular conference hashtag this year, so that made me happy.<\/p>\n

3.) Aside from one man (at the Media Sociology pre-conference<\/a>), who stood next to where I was sitting and spent an entire presentation<\/i> staring at some combination of me and Tweetdeck on my laptop screen, no one much seemed to care about the fact that I was livetweeting. I think I heard all of one snarky remark about Twitter during the whole of ASA13, and it wasn\u2019t even interesting (or pointed) enough for me to remember it clearly. Though I\u2019ve been told that \u201cpeople tweeting during sessions\u201d was A Big Deal even a few years ago, it mostly seems like a non-issue now; in fact, it seems like such a non-issue that even those of us who are into livetweeting at conferences couldn\u2019t get all that excited about it this year. I seem to recall spending a lot of ASA2012 involved in fairly intense conversations on the session hashtags, but at ASA13, I more often than not felt like I was just taking public notes\u2014which, while still a worthwhile pursuit, is not quite the same thing.<\/p>\n

4.) The #ASA13 hashtag did considerably enhance my experience of ASA 2013, and I remain a committed enthusiast both of conference hashtags and of more fully\u00a0augmented conferences<\/a> (like Theorizing the Web). But I have to admit: if we’re going to talk about converting non-users of particular social media platforms, I\u2019ve actually gotten far more people to start using Snapchat than I\u2019ve gotten to start using Twitter. This is probably due mainly to saturation\u2014aka, the fact that the majority of people I know who would<\/i> use Twitter are already doing so, whereas the same is not true of using Snapchat\u2014but this minor detail still strikes me as mildly amusing (especially since I myself initially resisted Snapchat). I do have a few friends who live-snap me their readings of things (much as some of us, grad students especially, sometimes livetweet our readings of things), but\u2014for obvious reasons\u2014I doubt that livesnapping will ever become much of a conference phenomenon; as a result, my Social Media Activism Score for the 2012-2013 conference season is probably pretty low. Alas.<\/p>\n

What are your thoughts\u2014about hashtag participation generally, or about ASA 2013 specifically?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

With her new username, Whitney Erin Boesel (@weboesel<\/a>) saved four characters per tweet for everyone who talked with her on #ASA13\u2014but is still slightly thrown every time she checks her @-replies and sees people addressing her newest performance of self.<\/em><\/p>\n

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