I think that Dan nailed it. I think that the backchannel is perfectly reasonable as a frontchannel when the speaker is trying to entertain, but when the goal is to convey something with depth, it encourages people to be impatient and frustrated, to feed on the speaker. There's a least common denominator element to it. I was not at Web2.0 Expo to entertain, but to inform. Yes, I can be an entertaining informant, but there's a huge gap between the kind of information that Baratunde tries to convey in his comedic format and what I'm trying to convey in a more standard one. And there's no doubt I packed too much information into a 20 minute talk, but my role is fundamentally to challenge audiences to think. That's the whole point of bringing a scholar to the stage. But if the audience doesn't want to be challenged, they tune out or walk out. Yet, with a Twitter stream, they have a third option: they can take over.

The problem with a public-facing Twitter stream in events like this is that it FORCES the audience to pay attention the backchannel. So even audience members who want to focus on the content get distracted. Most folks can't multitask that well. And even if I had been slower and less dense, my talks are notoriously too content-filled to make multi-tasking possible for the multi-tasking challenged. This is precisely why I use very simplistic slides that evokes images for the visual types in the room without adding another layer of content. But the Twitter stream fundamentally adds another layer of content that the audience can't ignore, that I can't control. And that I cannot even see.

Definitely read the full article, especially if you ever speak at conferences. The author of this article is one brave lady for writing about this so openly...