What boarding school taught me about live Tweeting (And why live Tweeting is good for your brain)

I have "attended" conferences while at my laptop, far from the event's physical location. Through live Tweeting, attendees in the room with the speakers tell me and others around the world what is being said on stage. Because of the efforts of Tweeters in the room, we can get an excellent summary of each speaker's points through short messages, each with 140 characters.

When I first heard of live Tweeting, I was dismissive and wondered how the technique could convey to me the essence of a speaker's thoughts. After reading live Tweets from several conferences, I changed my mind. Now I look for the hashtag (see below) of any conference in which I am interested and follow the Tweets.

And I am disappointed when there are few or no live Tweets. For example, last week I was looking forward to reading the Tweets from a keynote at a conference in DC, but alas only two Tweets were sent during the talk. Instead, during the keynote, an attendee decided to Tweet her own aphorisms, unrelated to the talk, using the conference's hashtag! A rude violation of live Tweeting etiquette. What was doubly annoying was her silly aphorisms probably would have been rejected by card designers at Hallmark.

She was hogging the back channel—and with Tweets that were pointless.

Those of you new to live Tweeting are probably saying, "Slow down. WHAT is the back channel?" The