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The Silent Room Tone

I didn't actually get to see the now infamous Mark Zuckerberg interview yesterday at SXSW, but having read through about six thousand blog posts about it, I feel as though I've seen it. And, naturally, I have some thoughts about what happened, some of which connect to what happened the day before when I was on the same stage talking with Henry Jenkins.

Most accounts of the interview have talked about the role that the Twitter "back channel" played in the event. Clearly it was pivotal, and I think it sheds some interesting light on how face-to-face group events are changing thanks to communication tools like Twitter. 

I probably did more than fifty public appearances last year in front of crowds -- speeches, conversations, interviews, panel discussions, etc. And every time I get up there, the primary thing I'm thinking about -- more than the words themselves, most of which I've said before in roughly the same sequence -- is the room tone. In the words of our commander in chief: is the audience with me or against me? Are they having fun? Are they confused? Am I talking at too technical a level? Am I being condescending and talking down?

This can be very hard to gauge, because the information channels that flow back from an audience to a speaker are very narrow ones. An audience enraptured by a fascinating story is, most of the time, indistinguishable from an audience slumbering at a ponderous lecture. You can't read facial expressions in that environment, so all you have to go on is the sound, and the sound in both those cases is silence.

This is the main reason that I compulsively make jokes when I'm in front of a crowd. Not because I'm a ham (though that's no doubt part of it) and not even because the audience likes to laugh. The big reason to make jokes is because they're the best way to get a quick read on the collective mind of the group you're talking to. The volume of the laugh is important, but so is the lag time. You can tell immediately if they're on your side, and if they're really following what you're saying, by how quickly the crowd responds to your jokes.  And in doing so you open up the channels of information flowing back to you from the audience. If they're slow, you know you have to adjust, wake them up a little. If they're quick, you know you've got their attention.

In our talk on Saturday, Henry took another approach that had the same effect: he had a couple of "rallying cry" lines that set up the audience to murmur or applaud in endorsement. (A bunch were about Obama.) That's a great approach if you can pull it off; you really know you have your crowd if they're clapping mid-conversation.

But most of the time the crowd is quiet and unknowable. The room tone is silent. The one advantage you have as a speaker is that this unknowability extends into the crowd itself. Each individual might be sitting there quietly steaming at the absurdity of your comments, but unless they start openly hissing at you, they have no way of realizing that all of their neighbors are feeling the same hostile sentiments. And because people are more inclined to chuckle, laugh, or clap than they are to boo or hiss, the public signals that flow back to the center stage tend to be positive or indifferent, and not openly negative.

But backchannels like Twitter change all that. When enough audience members connect with each other, a consensus room tone can quickly form, with each member's personal outrage amplified silently by his or her neighbors'. Onstage, of course, you see and hear none of this. All you know is that the crowd is quiet Until something tips, and they start vocalizing as a group, having been empowered by the backchannel consensus.

And that's the irony of it: you have a thunderous room tone that is audible to everyone in the room except the people on the stage.

I'm not sure what to make of this. I think the overall system is on the whole better than the traditional lecture information channels. But I also think it has its quirks and points where it fails outright -- and given all that, Sarah Lacy probably had a case when she said she had a hard job up there. But maybe by thinking these issues through we can make it easier next time around.

Games and the iPhone

Two quick thoughts on the iPhone announcement today:

First, an open question: does this mean the only way you can do over-the-air syncing of calendar events and contacts (a feature I really, really want) is by connecting to an Exchange server? That would be pretty intense if Apple limited a crucial feature exclusively to users of a Microsoft product. Shouldn't iCal and Google Calendar users be first in line?

Second, I think by far the most important news today came in the form of those game demos. We knew the SDK was coming; we knew that some kind of enterprise support was coming. But you watched those games -- particularly with the accelerometer support -- and it was suddenly clear that the iPhone platform is potentially a serious competitor to the DS and the PSP. That's a whole new industry that Apple has NEVER seriously tried to be competitive in, but the touch and accelerometer hardware/software built into the iPhone means that they are -- literally overnight -- the Wii of the handheld gaming market: a platform where the controller innovation changes all the rules.

Brooks/Cheney

David Brooks writes about Obama and Clinton's Jefferson-Jackson speeches last November in his column this morning:

Obama sketched out a different theory of social change than the one Clinton had implied earlier in the evening. Instead of relying on a president who fights for those who feel invisible, Obama, in the climactic passage of his speech, described how change bubbles from the bottom-up: “And because that somebody stood up, a few more stood up. And then a few thousand stood up. And then a few million stood up. And standing up, with courage and clear purpose, they somehow managed to change the world!”

For people raised on Jane Jacobs, who emphasized how a spontaneous dynamic order could emerge from thousands of individual decisions, this is a persuasive way of seeing the world. For young people who have grown up on Facebook, YouTube, open-source software and an array of decentralized networks, this is a compelling theory of how change happens.

Nice. I don't know if Brooks has read Emergence or not, but one of things I take a little pride in is the connection between Jacobs and the world of decentralized software, Open Source, etc. People had obviously been thinking about those themes before I wrote Emergence but the whole concept of applying Jacobs' urban theories to the way we think about the web was something that hadn't been done before, as far as I know -- and now it's a much more familiar connection to people, so much so that Brooks can made an offhand reference to it without even walking though the logic. That's pretty cool to see.

While I'm patting myself on the back, I have some direct evidence (the details of which I can't reveal for national security reasons) that Dick Cheney read The Ghost Map over Christmas, and apparently enjoyed it. (I'm kidding about the national security, but not about the fact that he read it.) Obviously, I'm not the biggest fan of Cheney, but still, there's something very cool about the idea. It's one of the things that's so rewarding about writing books; I effectively got five or six uninterrupted hours to talk directly to the Vice President about my theories about cities, disease, progress -- even the anti-science bent of the current administration. I didn't get actual face time, but my ideas did.

Of course, all of this had made me think about how to get the next book into the hands of Obama... By the way, I have a new next book that I'm starting to write this month. More about that later.