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.