‹ Who sacked the subs at ZDNet, then? •
Thanks to that strange thing called “work”, I’ve missed most of the hoo-hah about Sarah Lacy’s disastrous interview with Mark Zuckerberg at SXWS. However, there’s a point which I don’t think has really been made - the role of the way in which conference attendees now listen to keynotes.
I haven’t seen the talk, but to be honest, I’m surprised that anyone would expect an interview with Mark Z to be anything other than deathly dull. Steve Jobs he’s not. Heck, he’s not even Bill Gates. And Sarah is not an engaging interviewer: live interviews are not her medium.
But what’s really interesting is the role that the back channel of live blogging, Twitter etc will have played in reinforcing the audience’s reaction. At tech conferences, you have an audience that is largely paying attention to their screens, rather than to what’s happening on stage. This means that the reaction of the audience will be magnified, as the reaction is passed from audience member to audience member in real time.
This kind of continuous partial attention is par for the course at geek meets, and it is gradually creeping into business meetings too. In fact, as Jeremy Zawodny pointed out a while ago, the issue of use of laptops in meetings has become such a controversial one that some companies are implementing a “no laptop” rule.
But the problem with an audience which is live blogging, Twittering, and so on is that it’s not paying attention to what’s happening on stage. Now in some cases - and maybe the Lacy keynote was one - this is entirely understandable. The worst keynote I ever saw was Gil Amelio’s 1997 San Francisco Macworld - two hours of dullness, enlivened only by a ten minute talk on NeXTSTEP by the newly-returned Steve Jobs. If that had been being Twittered and liveblogged as much as SXSW, I doubt Amelio would have made it out of the room alive.
As someone says on Jeremy’s post, “Bottom line: bring yourself and 100% attention.” If you’re live blogging an event, you’re missing the event in favour of giving instant reaction. And if the event is so empty of interest that you can live blog it and take in all the detail, you’re probably wasting your time there anyway.
Tags: Business, Mark Zuckerberg, Meetings, Sarah Lacy
On FriendFeed, this post was liked by 0 people and commented on 0 times hide
When has anyone given 100% attention in any meeting?
Laptops, cellphones, PDAs, pagers. How many years do you have to go back before the technology doesn't exist? Quite a few years.
I know of meetings where the bleeps and blips of Palms was going on because two people with them kept exchanging notes back and forth. Who knows if any of those notes were even about the meeting itself?
What exactly is the problem? Was it the fact that people were commenting about things that were going on (which evidently they were paying attention, because they were talking about the meeting itself, not the turmoil in Tibet or whatever the news of the day was)? Or was it the fact that the meeting/interview was just wretched?
Sarah Lacy can complain all she wants, but if it was a bad interview, she's the one to blame. People are rude. That's a fact that's been a fact even before technology.
I just hope that Ms. Lacy has learned something of the situation, instead of just crying that it isn't fair. Life in general isn't fair.
I turn a cellphone off when I go into a meeting. I don't use a laptop. But that's because, as the guy commenting on Zawody's post says, I bring 100% attention.
i'd suggest you watch the interview to get the full impact. it really warrants the reaction, in my opinion.
But if you're not recording the event in some way - whether it's liveblogging, livetweeting, taking notes on a laptop, or taking notes with pen and paper - how do you retain what happened at the event - or at least the important points?
That having been said, I believe that using liveblogging/livetweeting to plan when to raise your hands en masse, or to cough en masse, or whatever, is in my view another thing entirely.
Record it on audio or video. Take quick notes about ideas, but nothing that will intrude into your attention too much.