At the final wrap up of the Media in Transition conference, David Silver made a couple of interesting comments that seemed in contradiction with one another. He spoke about how the conference was too traditional in its format. You had your keynote speakers. You had your panelists and you had ten minutes at the end of each session where others could add their own brief thoughts in the form of questions. The conference wasn’t enough of a conversation. It didn’t reflect the way the transitioning media was changing the way we communicate.

At the same time, he bewailed the large number of people using email, twitter and other online tools during the conference. In this world of constant or continuous partial attention (CPA), it means that speakers only get partial attention. In an old media view, this isn’t desired. I remember teachers often asking for our total undivided attention, yet for those of us who probably would have been diagnosed with ADD, that was pretty hard. There was always a squirrel running by some window outside.

Most people tend to speak of CPA negatively. People are distracted from the keynote speakers. I would like to challenge that. Twitter, email and blogs are some of the tools that can be used to make the conference much more of a conversation. A few conferences I attend have a chat room which anyone can join and share their thoughts. These chat rooms are often projected on the screen behind the speaker or panelists so even those without a laptop at the conference can at least see what everyone else is writing.

Personal Democracy Forum has done this very effectively, yet it points out a problem. Sometimes the chat can be more interesting than the speaker, and if you aren’t an interesting speaker, this can be particularly threatening.

As people start doing mixed reality conferences that take place in part in Second Life, where the people in the audience can see what is going on in Second Life, and the people in Second Life have their chat going on, as well as seeing a video stream of the conference, the distractions can get even more confounding. A person can chose an avatar of a squirrel and go running across the virtual stage. “Look there goes a squirrel”, takes on a whole new meaning in these contexts.

Yet there are good reasons to include these sorts of tools for making conferences more participatory. First and foremost, there is Dan Gillmor’s old saying about the audience knowing more about the subject than the journalist. It seems to apply well to audiences and speakers at conferences. Then, there is another aspect, what I think of as the art of the fugue.

I think it is damaging to suggest that we should live single threaded lives, giving our undivided attention to one topic and then another. Life is more complicated than that. It is a fugue, a tapestry, with many themes or threads weaving together to create a beautiful picture. It is counter point.

So, tomorrow, I’ll attend Personal Democracy Forum, and I look forward to the whole event, the speakers, the chatting between sessions and the backchannel, not only for the information that I’ll get but also for the chance to participate in a fugue, a tapestry which celebrates the many voices, the point and the counter point of our political dialog.

(Tags: pdf2007, MIT5).