In-Room Chat as a Social Tool — an experiment by Clay Shirky and friends

Fascinating piece by Clay Shirky reporting what happens when you give participants in a group discussion a chat-room, the contents of which are projected onto a screen so that all meeting participants can read it. As ever with Shirky, the commentary is intelligent and judicious, and frank about both the pluses and minuses of the experiment. Two interesting points: from the photographs, it looks as though most of those attending the meeting were using Apple PowerBooks or iBooks (which indicates a non-representative sample); and the observation by Shirky and another participant, Steven Johnson, that the online Chat had “sucked the humor out of the discussion”. (The jokes were mostly in the Chat transcript, it seems.)