On Thurs­day I was a pre­sented on the future of eRead­ers (like the Kin­dle) at O’Rielly’s online Tools of Change con­fer­ence. It was a bit of an odd expe­ri­ence. While the talk was to an audi­ence of over 230 peo­ple, I never saw a sin­gle one of them (or heard them for that mat­ter). I gave the talk from a study room in Cornell’s Mann library, using Webex soft­ware to show my slides and talk­ing to the audi­ence via a cell phone con­nec­tion (and a blue­tooth head­set). The only ref­er­ence to atten­dance was a par­tic­i­pant counter in the Webex interface.

It’s more than a lit­tle jar­ring to have no imme­di­ate feed­back (semi­otic backchan­nels) like body lan­guage, facial expres­sions, or other forms of crowd engage­ment while speak­ing. I could have tried fol­low­ing the par­tic­i­pant chat while I talked, but I wor­ried that I’d get to dis­tracted. On the plus side, I was able to play the “aging hip­ster”, pre­sent­ing in jeans and rep­re­sent­ing RIT Taga with one of their awe­some silkscreened shirts.

I did get a copy of the chat log (my favorite response was “Cul­tural Anthro­pol­ogy is the new Black.”) And there are a few sum­maries of my talk float­ing around. And for those in the audi­ence who stum­bled across this blog, over the next few days I’ll be post­ing short essays on what I dis­cussed both here and at the OPL’s site.