Erik Marshall

The phenomenon of backchannels has fascinated me lately. It started at danah boyd’s talk at U of M (.mov version) back in October, where a twitter hashtag (#danahjsb) was announced early on. Although I didn’t know anybody there, I ended up in a conversation with others in the room while the talk was going on, and I learned as much from the backchatter as from the talk.

If you are not at the conference or event in question, you can use backchannels to eavesdrop. Take, for example the Internet as Playground and Factory conference (#ifp09), which had some heavy-hitters attending. Monitoring the backchannel discussions allows non-participants to interact with those present, and to keep abreast of the various topics being discussed.

The concept is not new. Students IM or text each other in class. Other social situations often call for subrosa communication. The most interesting difference is that the use of public social networking tools like twitter make the process public, and allow people to interact with strangers, or with people whose phone numbers or other info you don’t have.

A couple caveats. First, I wonder about the split in attention required for such discussion. If I am engaged in a backchannel discussion while listening to a speaker, can I really fully attend to what the speaker is saying? How much can I really do at one time? The second caveat is specifically twitter-related: the twitter search doesn’t seem to stay current for very long, so backchannels don’t persist as archives, but are useful really only during or just after an event.

While I am concentrating mainly on academic conferences, I imagine backchannels would be a good way to organize and communicate in other arenas, such as political events. Does anybody have any examples of backchannel communication in other areas?