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Comment by ScottWhigham | Hacker News Reader

I don't get why people are downvoting this - anyone care to chime in as to what he said that was downvote-worthy?

I assume it is being down voted because it is off topic. ...tweeting or surfing the web as though it were a slow day at the office (what the parent is talking about) is a very different thing from live-tweeting an event (what the article is talking about).

I don't see a substantial difference in tone between the article and my post. Instead of downvoting me, why not explain the difference between "tweeting" and "live-tweeting"? I don't see one there either; it seems like an attempt to avoid thinking critically about internet habits and I suspect the downvotes are more reflective of my comment hitting too close to home than it being off-topic.

Tweeting: Broadcasting messages on twitter.

Live-tweeting (see also live-blogging): Broadcasting messages on twitter in directly relation to and following the goings-on of the event you're currently participating in .

Livetweeting also has the ability to be a kind of note taking. If you've ever watched a live blog, it's the same concept, just with a shorter text field.

If you haven't and have no idea of the concept, here's a recent one:

http://live.cnet.com/Event/Googles_next_dimension_of_Maps_ev...

Tweeting: Wow this conference is boring as heck, and the food sucks too #firstworldproblems

Live-tweeting: Foonly just announced that the foomatic v2 will have high-speed backchannel integration! #foocon2012

I know what live tweeting is, I was inviting someone to explain how it is different from tweeting in terms of being an unnecessary distraction. With all the ways slides and videos and blog posts disseminate news following tech conferences I'm having trouble thinking of a less efficient way to do so than for dozens of people to be "live tweeting" nuggets from a talk 140 characters at a time.

This is not twitter-bashing, I really feel that as a matter of basic decency and for their own intellectual growth audiences should be actively listening and making connections so that after the talk they can have something more interesting to say than "tl;dr".

If you are so caught up in your initial reactions to a speaker that you pre-emptively distract yourself you are missing out on a lot of opportunities for insight into yourself and your community. I don't see the value in dozens of people flying to a city just to sit in hotel ballrooms and regurgitate things over the wifi.

Can't help but agree with you here. I think tweeting (whether about the conference or not), surfing the web, reading/responding to email, etc. during a talk are symptomatic of the same inability to maintain focus and to think deeply when that's not PRECISELY what we want to be experiencing in a given moment.

Because of the fleetingness of the things we do online, even if the particulars are boring and mind-numbing (e.g., reading fifteen Cracked Top 10 articles in a row, or fruitlessly tweeting to tech celebrities in hope of a reply), we don't notice because the experience in general gives us the impression of fulfillment by virtue of its variety alone.

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