The last line of yesterday's Twitter poem was a complaint that the association's "social media creds" were tarnished because "Angela Sinickas prohibits tweating during her session."
After I stopped chearing, I e-mailed Angela to get the background. She came back:
—Miss something important
—Distract their neighbors and make them miss something important
—not to mention being distracting and disrespectful to the speaker.
I don't see why people can't just take notes during the session as usual, and then tweet any interesting cool notes immediately after. Is there some contest to be the first to say "Angela Sinickas says you CAN measure communication's ROI"?
If there was a civil rights movement just for speakers that fought to make it illegal to tweet during sessions, I would march in it.
The speaker has learned about the audience, prepared and rehearsed a lecture, traveled to the event and summoned the fortitude to stand before his or her colleagues and present his or her ideas for evaluation.
Do we or do we not owe it to the speaker to sit still for the course of the talk and take the speech in in all its context before sending our glib little 140-character evaluations and raccoon insights out into the world?
I think civilized people will agree that we do. As for the rest of you: Tweet this.