Social Media and the Twitter Backchannel at CHI2010

Some ~2400 of us are packed into a huge hotel in Atlanta for the CHI 2010 conference, which is the premier conference in Human-Computer Interaction research.  One major trend this year at CHI2010 is the number of sessions and papers on social media and social computing, such as the study of online communities in China, the study of social computing tools in enterprises, and the use of sentiment analysis and recommendation in Twitter.  In fact, there are so many sessions on social computing and social media, I am having trouble attending to all of the latest research.

A major trend this year is the use of Twitter as a backchannel for information distribution and commenting during and after the talks.  People are also following the conference from afar using the #CHI2010 hashtag.  Conference attendees are using room designations to report on specific activities in different parallel tracks, and using it to decide whether to hop over to a different session.  Interestingly, they're also using it to comment on the talks and to spread these comments.  For example, when Ben Shneiderman made a particular heavy remark, it spread amongst the attendees.  

 

These practices are enabling conferences to be less about one-to-many lectures on the latest research and more about peer-to-peer interactions.  Other kinds of information diffusion include travel disruptions to Europe due to the Iceland volcano eruption.  There is even an inside-joke-viral video about Hitler's fake comments about research in CSCW and CHI communities spreading, somewhat at my expense. 

Twitter, having started as a backchannel tool at SXSW, seems to have made inroads at academic conferences.  It has enabled backchannel commenting and info distribution.

Ed H. Chi is an Area Manager and Principal Scientist in the Augmented Social Cognition Group at the Palo Alto Research Center.  You should also follow him on Twitter (username 'edchi').