Session Title
Tweet Overload: Acknowledging the Elephant In the Room
Presenter
Peter Roessler, Salesforce.com
Session Type: Discussion
We’ve all seen it. It’s par for the course now at every conference. Twitter mania. It got me thinking about whether we are starting to cross a line. Is the use of Twitter spinning out of control and diluting the very value it provides?
My strongest example of this comes from the sheer volume of tweets during conference sessions. Who is actually paying attention to the content? How much is the audience/speaker distracted by all the meta activity? There may certainly be other relevant contexts. I’d like to uncover them.
Ultimately, I’d like the audience to walk away with a keener awareness of how easily the value offered by a technology can be lost based on appropriated usage patterns and the resulting potential distractions.
Potential Discussion Points:
* Debunking myths about the human brain and multitasking
* Other examples of misappropriation of Twitter (or other technologies) and the perceived negative social impact
* Appropriate social norms for using Twitter
Biography
Peter Roessler is a User Researcher at Salesforce.com and has 7 years of experience conducting generative user research in all its forms. Before establishing the practice of qualitative research with customers at Salesforce.com, he held research roles with SAP’s Design Services Team, Sun Microsystems, and Intel Research Seattle.
Peter enjoys running and completed the San Francisco Marathon in 2006. He also plans to join the San Francisco Lesbian/Gay Freedom Band this year, playing mellophone, the instrument he played in high school.
3 Comments
Perfect. I got sucked into a weird frenetic tweeting experience at Interaction09. It was very exciting, but I felt very guilty for stepping so far outside the in-room experience (admittedly I have a short attention span) but fascinated by the intensity of the dialog online and how it was relevant and continued to the hallway conversations; on one hand it felt like we created more conversation; on the other hand, it was definitely not living up to things I value like being present, being here, etc. etc. Can’t wait to see this presentation, especially if mellophone is included.
I think your proposed topic is interesting … and your comment that Twitter is just the latest example is critical. Yes, I agree you should include content about the effectiveness of multitasking. This recent item in the NYT was interesting:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/30/weekinreview/30pennebaker.html
It sites a study published in the August 24 edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
As a “business guy”, I have been struck with the number of communication technologies that each information worker must cope with minute-to-minute in their job. Of course the basics … phone and email. Many companies now include chat applications as part of the core desktop. Add mobile-phone based interactions (and the immediately interrupting “walkie-talkie” style communicators).
The core question are the social / cultural expectations, and how a company (or any organization) establishes norms of behavior. Should every phone call be answered? If not, must every voice-mail message be returned? Does each email require a response? To: vs. CC:? Aliases or groups? Under what circumstances may I ignore a specific medium? It’s all about the norms.
Good Luck!
I very much like your topic. My experience with “Debunking myths about the human brain and multitasking”:
I lecture at the Avans University of Applied Sciences in Breda, the Netherlands. Since my students follow the bachelor programme “communication and multimedia design”, I tended to approve that students (18+) used their laptops during my speech. I knew, however, that they were using msn and other communication means. I used to test their ability of multitasking by questioning them about what I was telling just before. I’ve come to the conclusion that their multitasking abilities are very poor, although they believed to be very succesful multitaskers.
On the other hand: when I’m under the impression that my 7 year old daughter hasn’t heared my explanation on why I don’t want her to do X and I check, she always perfectly repeats the full sentence…..
Maybe the early “digital natives” are not yet fully operational multitaskers, but they certainly are getting better!