In what should be no surprise to May Seminar attendees (some of you will remember Alec Hosterman's article on the topic in Intercom 56.10), Twitter has become a significant part of the complex network of academic conference discourses. Conferencegoers are using Twitter to preview their own panels, to advertise the panels of others, to share the contents of their presentations, to give a sense of what the "can't miss" panels are, and--perhaps most importantly--to extend the session's dialogue, questions, and debate beyond the spatial and temporal limits of the conference itself. There are plenty of guides on the Web for how attendees can make the most of Twitter (see RMM), and even academic studies on the matter (see Wired Campus, for example)@CateBlouke we need a "Tweeting about Conference Panels in the Age of Tweeting about Conference Panels" panel #rsa12
— John Jones (@johnmjones) May 26, 2012
So wish I was with @KimEl and @cdmandrews at #RSA12 - hope they keep tweeting so I can follow virtually
— Deanna Mascle (@deannamascle) May 25, 2012
Yesterday, Collin Brooke (Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Writing at Syracuse) posted some interesting thoughts on his blog about the relationship between panel delivery and Twitter; I thought these would be relevant to share here, especially since the three of us were charged with tweeting and liveblogging RSA as best as we could. Describing the characteristics of a live-tweetable presentation (presentations with clear audiovisual signposts, a slower speaking pace), Brooke makes the case that presenters who wish to have their presentation RTed should take "shareability" into consideration as they're planning the delivery of their paper. Brooke offers a compelling theory for why certain panels may not have been as well-tweeted as others: because RSA publishes conference proceedings, more people tend to deliver by reading than might otherwise (likely in order to save labor on refitting the already-written paper for the far different mode of oral delivery). Such presentations are far more difficult to tweet than those where speakers work from notes or extemoraneously. One thing the three of us talked about after the first day what that we noticed much more reading than we'd expected from panels across the board (see Danielle's earlier post for more on this). Given the context that Brooke points out, all the reading we saw makes sense. (Of course, sometimes you read because you want to, and sometimes you read because you only *just* finished writing it the night before...)
There was still a lot of activity on the #rsa12 stream, but this is an interesting case for helping us understand the complexity of doing intellectual work in the 21st century. Even if we're not making solely digital presentations, our scholarship is knotted in a high-velocity digital network that affects what sense(s) audiences and remediators are able to make of it.
RSA14 idea: "Pimp my Panel: Twitter and the Art of Academic Teasers" #RSA12
— Christopher Andrews (@cdmandrews) May 26, 2012
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