[wordup] The Wifi Back Channel

[Adam Shand]

This article seems to have caused quite a stir, it's hardless a new 
thing for anyone that's gone to a technology conference in the last year 
or two.

I think Clay Shirky's point of "regardless whether it's a good thing, 
it's not going away" is probably the most pertinant one.

   http://www.corante.com/many/20030701.shtml#46771

Adam.

From:http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/24/technology/circuits/24mess.html?pagewanted=1

In the Lecture Hall, a Geek Chorus
By LISA GUERNSEY
July 24, 2003

At the University of Maryland, it started as an innocent question posed 
in an e-mail message to those attending WebShop, a three-week lecture 
series about the Internet.

"Does anyone else think it would be a good idea if we all had IM 
available to us during these lectures?" asked Sinan Aral, a doctoral 
student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of 
Management, referring to instant messaging. "Several times after 
questions, I wanted to 'whisper' to someone across the room or send a 
relevant link."

Mr. Aral discovered that he was not alone. The next day in the 
auditorium, which was outfitted with a wireless link to the Internet, a 
group of people booted up their laptops, opened their IM programs and 
spent the next three hours happily exchanging notes during the 
presentations.

The "IM circle," as it became known at the June lecture series, soon 
attracted more than a dozen people at a time. As the speakers ran 
through their PowerPoint presentations, the room hummed with the tip-tap 
of IM chatter.

"Is this really an economic issue?" wrote one audience member in 
response to a presenter's remark. "Experiments like this are too 
structured," wrote another. "Did he really just say that?" asked one. 
"Wow! He did," someone responded.

Over the past year, as wireless networks have been introduced in hotels, 
university auditoriums and conference halls, people with laptops have 
realized that they do not have to sit idly during the presentations. 
Some people, of course, ignore speakers entirely by surfing the Web or 
checking their e-mail - a practice that has led some lecturers to plead 
for connectionless auditoriums or bans on laptop use.

But others are genuinely interested in a lecturer's topic and want to 
talk concurrently about what is being said. They may also like to pass 
around links to Web sites that relate to, and may refute, a speaker's 
point. For them, wireless technology allows a back channel of 
communication, a second track that reveals their thoughts and feedback 
and records it all for future reference.

Cory Doctorow, a science fiction writer and blogger who has experienced 
this back-channeling at several international technology meetings, 
likens the chatter to what happens in the corridor just after people 
leave a conference session.

"We're just moving the corridor into the room and time-shifting it by 30 
minutes," said Mr. Doctorow, who takes notes and posts them to his 
Weblog, or blog, during conferences, enabling people to follow the 
speaker and Mr. Doctorow's take on the speaker at the same time.

Clay Shirky, an adjunct professor in New York University's interactive 
telecommunications program, has run experiments using messaging software 
to supplement face-to-face meetings of 30 people. Many participants find 
the experience highly stimulating, he said, explaining, "The 
intellectual quality of a two-track meeting is extraordinarily high, if 
it is run right and you have smart people involved."

But many speakers at the front of room are less enamored of the practice.

"To me, it's a little irritating, frankly," said Stewart Butterfield, 
chief executive of Ludicorp, a company that is developing Neverending, a 
multiplayer online game. In April, Mr. Butterfield addressed a 
conference on emerging technologies as listeners experimented with 
messaging software, including a program called Confab offered by his own 
company. The next week, when he spoke at a conference without any 
Internet access, "people were a lot more attentive," he said. (He added, 
however, that many of them kept opening their laptops during the 
speeches in the vain hope that somehow the Internet might have magically 
become available.)

Indira Guzman, a doctoral student and adjunct professor at Syracuse 
University who was at the WebShop lecture series, said she had become 
aware of the back-channeling while teaching her classes. "You realize 
that something is going wrong," Ms. Guzman said. "You think, 'Uh-oh, 
maybe they are talking about me.' "

Some people who have experienced the phenomenon cite a speech given last 
year at a computer industry conference by Joe Nacchio, former chief 
executive of the telecommunications company Qwest. As he gave his 
presentation, two bloggers - Dan Gillmor, a columnist for The San Jose 
Mercury News, and Doc Searls, senior editor for The Linux Journal - were 
posting notes about him to their Weblogs, which were simultaneously 
being read by many people in the audience.

Both included a link forwarded by a reader in Florida to a stock filing 
report indicating that Mr. Nacchio had recently made millions of dollars 
from selling his company's stock, although he complained in his speech 
about the tough economy. "No sympathy here," Mr. Gillmor wrote.

"When Dan blogged that, the tenor of the room changed," Mr. Doctorow 
said. Mr. Nacchio, he said, "stopped getting softball questions and he 
started getting hardball questions."

Some people are hoping that conferences will evolve to allow the 
undercurrent of conversation to be projected on a big screen in the 
front of the room. They say that such public disclosure will enable 
speakers and unconnected audience members to feel less isolated.

Mr. Shirky, the adjunct N.Y.U. professor, considers openness to be 
critical to productive discussions and conducts his messaging-software 
experiments so that all speakers can see what is being posted. At the 
University of Maryland, where the use of IM became a matter of a heated 
debate, several students said they were perturbed by the back channeling 
not because it seemed rude (although some argued that point, too), but 
because they felt left out.

The split focus of two-track meetings and back-channeled conversations 
have other drawbacks, not the least of which is that they can be utterly 
distracting. "There were times when I'd follow a thread and come back to 
the lecture and feel a little disoriented," Mr. Aral acknowledged.

Joichi Ito, a venture capitalist and former chief executive for the 
Japanese branch of the Internet service provider PSINet, opened a chat 
room for back-channeling during Supernova, a communications conference 
held this month in Crystal City, Va., just outside Washington. But Mr. 
Ito readily acknowledges the downside. "There is definitely a lot less 
focus in the room," he said, "but I think we were already starting to 
suffer from that."

At high-tech conferences where everyone is already wired to the gills 
with BlackBerry pagers and cellphones and can cope easily with constant 
connectedness and streaming information, the concept of multitrack 
communication channels almost seems matter-of-course. "This is not 
something that is going to go away," Mr. Ito said. As many technology 
experts point out, if laptops were banned, people would use cellphones. 
If wireless Internet access were not officially available, networking 
gurus would find a way to create ad hoc connections.

Some observers say that the multitrack channels will simply be 
considered a given by a young generation that has honed multitasking to 
a fine art and grew up on VH1's "pop-up" videos, in which commentary 
about the artists pops up on the screen during the song.

Meanwhile, Mr. Ito is already creating a new riff on the concept. He 
said he was working with a group on designing a "hecklebot," a 
light-emitting diode screen that displays heckling messages that are 
typed during online chats at conferences. "I want to make something that 
I can put in a suitcase and take to conferences," he said. He describes 
it as a subversive device that will get people thinking about the 
significance of the back channel. From the chat room, he said, "you 
could send something like, 'Stop pontificating.' "

If the speakers were logged on, they could play the game, too. Maybe 
some would type, "Pay attention."