I’m in New Orleans for a treasured aunt’s funeral, sitting
in my 88-year-old mother’s kitchen, some 650 miles away from my office. It’s
four in the morning. I’m connected online via my mother’s landline. We make do
with what’s available. My company’s CEO is in Switzerland for a big business
conference that will be livestreamed over the internet. The plan is for people
at the event to livetweet, and I will retweet them. The program will last one
hour.
Nothing goes according to plan. The
people in Switzerland forget to livetweet. The livestream will work only
herky-jerky over the landline. The company is announcing a big initiative, and
we have to livetweet it. I feel the panic rising.
Yes, we make do with what’s
available. I pirate the next-door neighbor’s wifi, pull up the livestream, and
begin to tweet a meeting 5,000 miles from where I’m sitting. No one knows that
I’m not in the room in Switzerland. And by following the stream via the
meeting’s hashtag, I can periodically retweet photos and what others are
recording. I end up with 45 tweets in an hour. I quickly assemble the tweets
into a narrative flow and post them on the company’s blog.
To
continue reading, please see my post today at The
High Calling.
Photograph by George Hodan via Public
Domain Pictures. Used with permission.
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