Twitterwalls: Do They Need Curation?

Adam Tinworth
Adam Tinworth

Ouch. This is a painful, but compelling, read:

I walked off stage and immediately went to Brady and asked what on earth was happening. And he gave me a brief rundown. The Twitter stream was initially upset that I was talking too fast. My first response to this was: OMG, seriously? That was it? Cuz that’s not how I read the situation on stage. So rather than getting through to me that I should slow down, I was hearing the audience as saying that I sucked. And responding the exact opposite way the audience wanted me to. This pushed the audience to actually start critiquing me in the way that I was imagining it was. And as Brady went on, he said that it started to get really rude so they pulled it to figure out what to do. But this distracted the audience and explains one set of outbursts that I didn’t understand from the stage. And then they put it back up and people immediately started swearing. More outbursts and laughter. The Twitter stream had become the center of attention, not the speaker. Not me.

That’s danah boyd telling how [a Twitterwall turned a shaky start to a presentation into a self-percieved disaster](http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2009/11/24/spectacle_at_we.html). I’ve seen danah speak in the past, and she’s *good*. So this helps demolish my thesis that Twitter wall misbehaviour is in inverse proportion to the quality of the session.
Indeed, I’m slowly coming round to [Alan Patrick’s position that un-curated Twitterwalls are just a recipe for mob rule](http://broadstuff.com/archives/1935-A-Sale-of-Two-Twitters.html) and diminishing the value of conference sessions.
alan patrickcurationdanah boydeventsX (Twitter)

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Adam is a digital journalism lecturer, trainer and writer. He's been a blogger for over 20 years, a journalist for 30 and teaches audience strategy and engagement at City St George’s, London.

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