A Twitter party and a Church that serves beer? New Communicators events 10/29/09

coming@party

I went to two New Communicators events Thursday night and it made for interesting experience.  The first event was called a coming@party; the premise was to get a bunch of people in a room and have them communicate with each other exclusively through twitter (after all, what says “party!” like a bunch of people silently twittering!)  My twitter skills are severely lacking and I don’t have an internet enabled phone, so I brought a mini netbook in an effort to save face.  All the participants added an #atparty hash tag to their tweets so it was easy to search and view the “conversations” happening in the room.  For me the experience was pretty frustrating, it took me awhile to catch on and I was using the twitter interface, which needed constant page refreshing (every second or two a message would say “6 new tweets since your last post.” Ahh!  TweetDeck was definitely the way to go for this experiment since it displays real time updates without the need to refresh.  After awhile I was able to get a back and forth conversation going with one person, while other people were managing about four or five.  The experience made me feel like a little kid on the playground, where all the big kids are throwing a ball back and forth and I’m jumping up and down saying “hey guys! Pass it to me!!”  Thankfully it wasn’t too long before Chappy called “time,” and we were able to have a normal discussion as a group (although I noticed that some people didn’t want to stop twittering!)  The synopsis of the group discussion was that in-person interaction is far richer and superior than digital interaction (at least when you are all sitting in the same room!)  I brought up the point that, at least in my experience, quality goes down as people multitask, which probably explains why there are so many uninteresting tweets.  Erin Kurtz, (the Art Director at Substance,) commented that people multi-task by nature, so a tweet can be a pretty accurate depiction of a person’s mental state.  As someone with ADD who is rather horrible at multitasking I mentioned that I’d prefer it if people didn’t tweet and drive or talk on a phone as they order their coffee.  Chappy brought up the point that when we spend so much time communicating digitally we end up thinking to ourselves, “wow, did I ever have interpersonal skills?”  I reassured Chappy that no, he didn’t, and the event was over (kidding!)  Overall the event was interesting and amusing; it was the kind of thing that people should try as a social experiment but not as a substitute for a real party with human interaction and verbal conversation.

The Church of Social Media

The next event was The Church of Social Media, which was much livelier than the silent @party!  The premise was to get a group of people together to share stories and sing the praises of social media (led by the faithful Dan Chapman himself.)  The event started a little late, as guests enjoyed delicious beer and made pleasant conversation.  Erik Knutson found a lovely image of a gothic cathedral for a digital projection background and it wasn’t long before everyone was happily buzzed and ready for some social media gospel.  Chappy started out by telling the tale of a girl in Miami that he had amazing Facebook message chemistry with (“it was like we were making brain love!”) but sadly zero phone chemistry with.  Later on the mic was passed to Bill Siebold, who told a story about a former classmate contacting him from his past, and how it brought him to the realization that he remembers very little from the seventies. The mic made its way around the room as attendees shared stories of job opportunities, reunions, love, and heartbreak fueled by the internet and social media outlets.  I shared a story about reconnecting with my eighth grade teacher online, which resulted in a hilarious picture from my childhood and a phone call from a friend that I hadn’t heard from in months.  Aipd students, faculty, and new faces alike all had interesting stories to tell, (it’s a shame it wasn’t captured on video because it would have made for some great public access programming or YouTube videos!)  The underlying message of all the stories was that Facebook, e-mail, Skype, and other forms of social media bring people together in ways that were not possible before this technology existed. Let’s just say that “The Church of Social Media” isn’t getting smaller anytime soon; amen to that!

-Allyson Dutko