So, as I previously stated, there was some drama with the live Twitter feed at the conference’s keynote session on Tuesday.
I would like to take this time to preface this blog post with the statement that Danah Boyd is a brilliant woman who has broke more of a mental sweat than I have ever planned on and has accomplished sixteen thousand times more meaningful things than that one screenplay I plan on writing one day.
I would also like to preface that this post is going to be a geek’s quief.
Alright, SO, Tuesday.
There was a keynote session with a live Twitter feed for the hashtag #w2e on stage. I’m talking HUGE TIME. Now there was a butt load of awesome speakers starting with Tim O’Reily, the guys from Digg (swooooon), Caterina Fake of Hunch.com and Chris Brogan. It was amazing and the uncensored Twitter feed was mostly middle agers retweeting the exact words of the presenters and me saying things like:
I can’t remember reading a single slightly ill tweet about any of them.
They were amazing speakers that really (for lack of better Hipster Runoff cliche quotation) “got us”.
I’m gonna lay some truth out right now and say that the ugliness started with the AC. It was MUH’FUCKIN COLD UP IN THUR. So, everyone started tweeting like “blah blah blah my nipples are going to poke Boston Mike’s eyes out” and then Danah got up and everyone was like “whoa…
- she’s talking too fast
- she’s disconnected from the audience
- she’s reading from notes
- her slides are irrelevant
- she needs to breathe
Then things got a little rougher:
So, the feed was taken down.
When the feed was removed (or so I thought), I proceeded to tweet:
Which about two minutes later when they revived the live feed, went up in front of hundreds of people.
& thus I was the last straw of the live Twitter feed, which was almost immediately removed after my banner sized capped cursing.
Which at first filled me with a delightful sense of MUAHAHAHAHAness.
& then fear when after the speech,
the halls were filled with Marissa A. Ross HATE.
There was a full fledged riot headed by those middle agers- lighting trash cans on fire and throwing the servers from the INTEROP conference show room from the second floor, It was frightening.
And for all the “omg that was so high school” those same middle aged doofuses tweeted after,
I don’t know what high school you went to
but no one said Danah was a stupid, fat, slut.
No one was knocking her actual content, it was the fact that she didn’t know how to address an audience with the attention span of StumbleUpon. I can tell you this much, it’s definitely NOT with a fifteen page, font size ten essay to be told in fifteen minutes. She is a ridiculously intelligent, talented & esteemed woman but for someone whose “research examines social media, youth practices, tensions between public and private, social network sites, and other intersections between technology and society” she should have seen this coming. A live Twitter feed?! That is like the prime intersection between technology and society!!! It’s as if the whole thing was an experiment to which I am not sure if we failed or succeeded.
I succeeded at personal branding
& failed at professionalism.
Wah wah wahhhhhhhhhhh.
So, I guess we all learned lessons.
Web 2.0 probably shouldn’t have uncensored feeds if they can’t take the heat.
Danah probably should let someone else present for her so she doesn’t catch fore mentioned heat.
& I probably shouldn’t be sent anywhere my personal hobbies intertwine with my career.
Oh wait… THAT’S MY LIFE.
(Sidenote: Is there an app for that?
I don’t have an iPhone,
It just seems like the culturally relevant thing to ask.)
