Elizabeth Lawley
Backchannels: Power and the active audience
Biography
Elizabeth Lane Lawley joined the faculty of the Information
Technology department at RIT in 1997, teaching primarily in the areas of web
design and development technologies. Her current teaching and research
interests focus on social computing technologies such as weblogs, wikis, and
real-time chat environments. She also conducts research and speaks on the topic
of gender imbalances in technology and education.
She received her master’s degree in Library Science from the
University of Michigan in 1987, and her doctorate in Information Science from
the University of Alabama in 1999.
In 2004 she founded RIT’s Lab for Social Computing, of which
she currently serves as the director. In July 2005, she will begin a one-year
sabbatical appointment as a visiting researcher at Microsoft Research. She
blogs at mamamusings.net,
www.corante.com/many,
and misbehaving.net/.
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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