Thrown to the Lions

I’ve only just caught up with Danah Boyd’s description of her experience when presenting at the Web2.0 Expo event. It was clearly very distressing for her, and understandably so. It would seem that the use of Twitter provided a backchannel for an audience to carry on a completely different conversation instead of taking the trouble to pay attention to the presenter. Mob behaviour resulted. In my day, I only had the rudeness of seeing some members of the audience doing emails on their laptops while I was attempting to give a presentation.