Until recently, the only time I’d ever tried live tweeting was while watching BBC Question Time using the dedicated hashtag #bbcqt. Following that hashtag was fascinating, enlightening and often hilarious but I no longer had a clue what was going on in the actual television debate.
For this reason I had been reluctant to live tweet at conferences – surely I couldn’t listen and tweet at the same time? Besides, I thought it looked a bit rude to be tapping away on my phone whilst the brave person up the front was delivering a paper they had been fretting about for weeks before.
Yet when I attended the annual conference for the British Sociological Association (my first proper academic conference) I have to confess: I live tweeted, and I enjoyed it.
It helped that the hastag #britsoc16 was set-up months before the event and was slowly gaining momentum leading up to the conference itself, so I started interacting before I even arrived which helped me get to know the community who were ‘hanging out’ there. My first few tweets at the actual conference were tentative retweets of comments and images, just one or two to start with to convince myself I was doing more than just ‘lurking’ in the discussion.
I wasn’t sure what to write in my own tweets, and like I said, I didn’t necessarily want to be that person on their phone while someone else was presenting. That was, until I heard something so important that I just had to share it:
Europe not facing a refugee 'crisis', when only 0.05% of citizens are classed as refugees. @GKBhambra on contesting concepts #britsoc16
— Heather Griffiths (@FlexiblePhD) April 6, 2016
It was as simple as that, and look…two retweets! It helped that it was a massive lecture theatre and the presenter couldn’t see me on my phone. But from then on I was hooked:
'Why don't we have a discourse of the feckless middle-classes?!' @ingram_nicola #britsoc16 #highered
— Heather Griffiths (@FlexiblePhD) April 6, 2016
Links with our @BSAPGForum conversations: @AcademicDiary suggests we foster an intellectual generosity in #sociology #britsoc16
— Heather Griffiths (@FlexiblePhD) April 6, 2016
Any comments that caught my attention got tweeted into the #britsoc16 converstaion, and tagging the presenter as well as the conference hashtag definitely increased the tweet’s engagement.
I even got brave by adding images and tagging ‘celebrity academics’:
Bit of shopping at #britsoc16 @dannydorling pic.twitter.com/PVaZBJsduw
— Heather Griffiths (@FlexiblePhD) April 7, 2016
Rather than distracting me from what was being said, live tweeting actually helped me retain some of the key ideas from the papers I’d heard as I had summarised them in my tweets. I also read all the other tweets about the presentations I’d seen (and missed), which supported or critiqued my own summary, so as well as helping solidify the new ideas I was hearing, I also felt part of a wider academic conversation that has been ongoing well after the conference has ended.
Live tweeting is also great for those moments when you are bumbling around the coffee machine on your own and can’t find anyone you know. It is also a great distraction for when you inevitably end up in a really boring presentation, despite the abstract looking so promising.
So if you fancy live tweeting but haven’t yet summoned the courage, I say give it a go. Even if you start tentatively at first, you will undoubtably hear something you think others must know about and before you know it you’ll have joined the conversation. But be warned, it may get just a little bit addictive! #britsoc16
Image copyright: By Nicolas Loubet [CC BY-SA 4.0], via Flickr.
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