I Tweet Therefore I Am Paying Attention

While I’m not on Twitter daily, I am a very active conference tweeter. I’m one of those people sitting by the electrical outlet with my laptop, hastily typing as the speakers present. To give you a better sense of the dichotomy between my everyday and conference tweeting, I present a screenshot of my July Twitter analytics:

tweet_activity

Can you guess when SHARP 2016 occurred?

I’ve had a few people ask me about conference tweeting. What am I doing? Why? And – most importantly – how can I listen and tweet at the same time?

Conference Tweeting 101

The idea is straightforward. As you listen to a speaker, you extract the main ideas, themes, questions, and illuminating examples. You then tweet these things, ideally each one in a single tweet but breaking it across multiple tweets is also an option if the idea is especially complex.

Because all good academics cite their sources, the format of these tweets tends to be something like “Name: idea expounded here #conferencehashtag” or “idea expounded here @speakersTwitterHandle #conferencehashtag”  Session hashtags sometimes emerge at more Twitter active conferences, to separate out the conversations happening around each panel.

tweet

Whenever possible, it’s best to include the speaker’s Twitter handle because this means they will be automatically notified of your tweet (and be able to see other Twitter users’ interest in their ideas). They will also be included in any conversations that happen because someone responds to your tweet. HOWEVER for that to happen, the speaker needs to tell the audience what their Twitter handle is.

Pro Tip: if you have a/v and want your talk to be tweeted, it’s best to include your Twiter handle at the bottom of every one of your conference slides.

The Benefits of Conference Tweeting

… are legion. Because I want to keep this short, I’ll stick to my top two.

You can’t be in more than one panel at a time, assuming you can even afford to attend the conference in the first place. Conference tweeting allows you to “peek” into other panels, spot synchronicity of themes across multiple panels, and virtually attend far more scholarly events than even the most generous professional development stipend could allow.

Social network visualization

Furthermore, conference tweeting is a fantastic way to network – to find people with like interests and spark conversations that begin online, continue in receptions, and last after that conference ends. I’ve had collaborations and future conference panels emerge organically from these conversations, in a way they never would have if I’d sat alone in the back of a conference room then quickly escaped that reception full of strangers

The Concentration Question

This is the question I get asked most often and I’ll give a longer version of my usual response. We train all our academic careers to take notes while listening to lectures and other auditory events. In fact, this is a skill I’ve practiced so long, I have to take notes in order to actively listen to a talk. If I’m not taking notes, I tune out. And for me, conference tweeting is a form of note-taking.

When the Internet connection’s bad, I still take notes in a text document, but I vastly prefer note-taking via Twitter. First, I almost never go back to look at my old notes but I do continuously reenage with old tweets either because someone’s liked/retweeted something or because I’m analyzing datasets of old conference tweets.

Image of conference tweets archive
Tweets Captured with TAGS v6.0 ns

Second, Twitter functions as essentially a communal note-taking platform, enabling me to see what other people are getting out of the same talk. Third, the public nature of this note-taking leads to immediate conversations with other conference tweeting, in which we dissect, analyze, and expand on the ideas we’re hearing together.

So the next time you’re sitting in a conference next to me or anyone else who has Twitter open in the browser, you’ll know: I tweet therefore I am paying attention.

Hello, World!

# begin program

def DeliverGreetingsUntoTheInternet():

print “Hello, world! “

print “¡Hola, mundo! “

print “Bonjour, le monde!”

print “Salve, munde!”

# end program

As is traditional, the first post on this blog had to be “Hello world!”

To anyone who stumbles upon this page at some point, consider yourself greeted. As your reward for clicking into a “Hello, World!” post that could have been filled with lorem ipsum, here is a word cloude generated from my ancient accountability blog that I maintained during part of my graduate school dissertation research sojourn.

Untitled
2009 Word Cloud