Richard Hodkinson

Backchannels: Power and the active audience

Biography
Richard Hodkinson is a researcher, information architect and entrepreneur currently taking a PhD at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California. His interests include technologies for the opening up of discourses in the public sphere: factors including new social forms such as weblogs; collaboration and interactivity forms such as open content and wikis; and institutional forms such as legal, political and organisational structures. He also studies how the sociology of news plays an important role in framing, agenda setting and control of media by the dynamics of sense-making and understanding of structural elites, privileged information workers and ordinary citizens. He is looking for interested programmers to develop some interesting research tools with him. He works with theories of collective action, media systems dependency, political communication and social movements, inter alia. Among the sites of analysis has been persuasion and internet strategies in election campaigns in the Los Angeles mayoral election primaries. His methods include network analysis, political communication and campaign research, and metaphoric analysis.

Previously he worked in London as an information consultant and developer both for blue chip and small startup organisations, as a journalist, and in Africa, and although he’s done time with SQL dBs he’s not a very good programmer. He hails from Lancashire in England and plays the piano, eats black pudding, and races street luge, albeit not simultaneously.

Position Paper
The growing availability of wireless Internet access in public places, coupled with the widespread use of mobile computing devices, has led to a dramatic increase in the use of synchronous communication tools in business and academic settings. These real-time chat environments are transforming once-passive audiences into active participants. This affords an increase in authority for audience voices, and a concurrent reduction in the perceived authority of the speaker.

Our anecdotal observation of backchannel use in these contexts has identified three directions for resulting activity: 1) unrelated conversations and activities that draw attention away from the topic being presented by the speaker, 2) related conversations on the presentation topic with other participants, and 3) online research related to the presentation to provide a feedback loop into the class.

These activities present a potential threat to the authority of the presenter: first by distracting the audience from the narrative and structure of the presentation; and secondly by opening the door to externally supported challenges to their authority.

One key difference between classroom and conference presentations, is the differing power relationship between speaker and audience. In a classroom, the teacher wields institutional authority, the power of assessment, which typically inhibits a student’s willingness to skip or walk out of classes. In conference settings, speakers usually have less hard power over their audience

The “Open Space” approach to meetings incorporates the “Law of Two Feet,” placing on the participant the responsibility for ensuring that they are always either learning or contributing—and if they are not, to leave for a place where they are. People who move frequently among activities are referred to as “bumblebees” because of their ability to cross-pollinate conversations. Backchannels facilitate this behavior in many ways, making it possible for participants to move among contexts, even when it is socially, physically or politically impossible for them to relocate themselves to a new context.

As these technologies become increasingly pervasive, they will be applicable in new political and everyday situations. Backchannels as unobtrusive real-time intra-audience talk are new: the only directly-applicable old-technology analogues are cumbersome note-sending and very discreet whispering.

We propose a set of studies to examine the effect of these digital backchannels on both audiences and presenters. How, to what extent and in what contexts do audiences achieve new practices for learning, information management, sense-construction, depth of analysis/understanding, and political relations. How does the instant feedback and cybernetic loop change the relationship between speaker and audience? Among audience members? How does knowledge of the backchannel change the speaker’s presentation? The ramifications of this for learning, credibility, entertainment, reputation-enhancement, or connecting the audience together in understanding are not yet established, but are predicted to be contextually remarkable. We propose a discussion of theoretical, conceptual and measurement for this topic. Our aim is to catalyse a discussion and a coherent research agenda around the concept of the digital backchannel.

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