Since I'm not at SXSWi and there's plenty of coverage of the keynote interview Sarah Lacy did with Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg on Sunday (which ended with the audience openly turned against her) I won't pretend to know what it was like to actually be in the room. I do know what it was like to watch the tweets fly by on Twitter during the event.
Communications tools like Twitter changed the way the audience reacted to the Zuckerberg interview. Immediate reactions were posted as tweets and then cross-posted on blogs and FriendFeeds within seconds. You didn't have to be in the room to know something strange was happening. And I can imagine those in the room, also getting their Twitter updates on their cell phones, were encouraged by all of the "live" comments to ramp up their criticism of Sarah Lacy's performance.
I'm not defending the way she conducted the interview. By most accounts I've read, she was guilty of making the story too much about herself instead of letting Zuckerberg talk. We're going to have to get used to the power our new communications tools have to motivate people - both positively and negatively.
Still, I wish I'd been there to hear all the phones buzzing and everyone texting tweets.
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