I has been a social media day here in London. The mid-day high profile panel items all got a fair amount of tweetage, and they were followed by a couple of Internet-themed panels. Let me elaborate.
My marathon panel session began with Ben Goldacre, he of the infamous Bad Science column in The Guardian. Ben is clearly a very experienced public performer who is developing a large than life personality for himself. Fortunately he’s using his awesome powers for good. He spent his talk explaining to us just how hopelessly corrupt and stupid the UK news media is. (I expect the news media in other countries are just as bad, but it is the UK that Ben has most of his experience with.) If you read anything in a newspaper about some sort of health scare (or miracle cure) my advice would be to ignore it. Ben is active on Twitter, and will doubtless be happily reading through a whole pile of congratulatory tweets.
Possibly the most interesting slide that Ben put up was one that graphed actual success in IQ tests against the subjects’ estimation of how well they had done. According to this study, people who are very smart tend to slightly underestimate how good they are; people who are of average intelligence mostly know that’s true; but people who do very badly in IQ tests massively overestimate their abilities. This may explain an awful lot about the Internet.
That panel was followed immediately by this year’s Hay Lecture featuring Oliver Morton. Ostensibly Oli was talking about geoengineering, but actually he spent much of his time talking about science fiction, ideas of the sublime, and how we interact with technology. I’d love to see a transcript of his talk, because his choice of words was excellent, but what he said was clearly designed to be read, not tweeted as sound bites.
Oli made a number of very good points, but I’m not going to elaborate on them here because I have discovered that mention of cl*m*t* ch*ng* is about the biggest troll magnet on the whole Internet. With any luck the Science Fiction Foundation, which sponsors the Hay Lectures, will put it online. They did film the talk.
Next up was a panel on writers and the Internet, in which there was much talk about things like whether you should respond to bad reviews and the like. I’m not sure that the panel was very responsible, but it was amusing.
Finally we had #Livecon, Danie Ware’s social media panel, which I covered live here. I didn’t get much of an audience (not surprising, it was too early on a Saturday morning for America), but I’d be grateful if some of you could replay it and tell me whether you could get a sense of the panel from what you see. This will be very useful feedback for the virtual convention panel tomorrow. There is a lot of backchannel chat on Twitter in there.
I do have one more panel tonight – on European SF – but after that I think I might actually get my first proper meal since Thursday.
