The Backchannel Eats Its Young: danah boyd and Web 2.0 Expo

I wasn’t in attendance at the recent Web 2.0 Expo when danah boyd and the Twittosphere collided in the perfect backchannel meltdown. However, I will just say what I have said for years (like after the famous Mena Trott Meltdown in 2005 at Les Blogs):

1. Only project the backchannel on the wall in groups with high social cohesion, like people working together in companies, or in other circumstances where everyone knows each other, and are working together on something.


2. Projecting the backchannel in groups of low social cohesion — like a big trade show conference — will almost inevitably lead to heckling, hate speech, and sex jokes.

We can slice the baloney as fine as you’d like— as danah does in her tell-all post — but the root cause of backchannel backlash is not the specifics of audience disaffection, but the lack of shared social ties, where churlishness has no consequence.

In danah’s case, she wandered off into a zone that was perceived by the audience as indicating ‘otherness’, and they started eating her, bite by bite.