Weird recursion

Brian Kelly has posted a fascinating analysis of the success of my slideshow 'Web 3.0 - the way forward?'. In What's the value of using Slideshare? he addresses several pertinent issues, and I highly recommend it as a thought provoking read. The story so far: You may recall if you have read previous posts on this blog that in July this year I presented a talk for an audience of 15 teachers. My 'audience' rapidly increased 1000 per cent when I posted my slides on Slideshare. In his post Brian asks several pertinent questions related to the potential amplification affordance of services such as Slideshare. But that's not the end of the story....

Brian used the hit count statistics of my slideshow as an example of event amplification in a keynote presentation he gave in Girona, Spain, just one week later. Because I featured in his presentation, I thought I had better watch the video recording of his presentation. In doing so, I opened up another set of questions, totally unrelated to the amplification issue. What happened was that while Brian was setting up his slideshow and preparing for his keynote, the microphone and video camera were live for about 60 seconds before he started. Although this is not a long time, it's long enough and it made me think. For me, this opened up questions about whether the amplification of events through live streaming was ethical, if either a) speakers were unaware they were being streamed (I'm sure Brian had already consented and was fully aware) or b) speakers were unaware that the pictures and sounds were live when they were not expecting them to be.

Recall earlier this year how the UK's former Prime Minister Gordon Brown was caught off camera but with his TV lapel microphone still live, making disparaging comments about a member of the public he had just met. Although arguably, this incident alone may not have lost him the general election, it severely damaged his reputation and standing amongst the electorate. The microphone gaffe - as its now known, even has its own Wikipedia page.

I'm not sure Brian knew the microphone and camera were live, and he certainly didn't make any gaffes or 'off the record' remarks which might have damaged his excellent reputation. But other speakers might not be so measured, and if 'off the cuff' remarks are made during open but unnoticed live streaming, what are the ethical implications? I have subsequently used image captures of Brian's keynote to illustrate this point at conferences in Nottingham and Berlin. To the observer these references within references must seem like some weird kind of recursive sequence, but I assure you, we didn't plan it.

Image source

Weird recursion by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.