At legal academic conferences, as well as academic conferences in other fields, it has become increasingly common for attendees to live tweet from sessions they attend, using hashtags that they create or that have been promulgated by conference organizers, or a mix of both. See, e.g., #AALS2016, #AALS2015, #LSMEX17. Today's Chronicle of Higher Education has an article by Noah Berlatsky on The Dangers of Tweeting at Conferences. Here is an excerpt:
Conference planners should also keep in mind the dangers and downsides of live-tweeting. They should alert attendees to potentially dangerous hashtags and encourage live-tweeters to use only official conference hashtags. Presenters should have the right to ask people not to live-tweet during their talk, and shouldn’t have to explain their reasons.
In short, default permission for live-tweeting should be expected at a scholarly meeting. But tweeters should be aware of the dangers, and presenters should be able to opt out easily if they wish.
Social media isn’t negative or positive in itself; it’s just a tool. As with any tool, you want to know how it works, when to use it, and where the sharp edges are. If organizers, tweeters, and presenters are careful and knowledgeable, Twitter can amplify and deepen the conference experience.
The full article is here. The author cautions against the inadvertent use of hashtags that may attract trolls, the concern that academic work might be quoted out of context, and the possibility that a blind peer-review process could be compromised (less of a problem for law profs who publish mostly in student-edited journals).
Given how many law profs there are on Twitter (see, e.g., here for data on law prof Twitter users from 2015; anecdotally, the number seems to have increased since then), I found the Chron article to be thought-provoking.
Journalist and historian David Perry gives this succinct advice: "If you think the paper sucks, don’t tweet it. Don’t say it’s bad; you don’t need to lie and say it’s good. Just stop tweeting. And I have done that. There have been papers about which I had nothing nice to say. So I said nothing at all, as our mothers taught us."
Is "live-tweeting" academic talks really that big of a problem?
Posted by: Enrique Guerra Pujol | November 16, 2017 at 10:29 AM