This post originally appears on the Open University’s website ‘Platform’ linked here
I didn’t just go to SXSW for the free cocktails, late night parties, and spontaneous meet ups.
No, I had work to do and a part of that was my own research. Simply put, I was really interested to know if anyone had any idea as to what ‘the next big thing’ might be.
The conference centre was where most people would gravitate towards, yet personally I found it repulsive. Not initially. I got to the conference centre before everybody other than security and it was a space full of potential. The corridors were wide and inviting. The barriers set up for registration zigzagged the great hall and everything seemed geared up for conversation.
As soon as the circus kicked off though the punters (of which I was very much one) were penned in and sold to: whether it be the constant bombarding with brands hanging in the air, brands in your food, brands asking you to scan a QR code so they could infiltrate your phone or brands on napkins you could wipe your disgust on. There was no escape.
Mainstream
For a large chunk of the festival I played the same game. After all, I owe much to my own accidental brand and the very fact I was walking the Austin streets was down to sponsorship from forward-thinking British brands.
I soon realised I was not alone in my discontent. Not just for the massively monetized conference but for the scene itself.
Perhaps now social media appeared mainstream (this was after all the first year SXSWinteractive had outsold the music festival).. perhaps now everyone was doing it.. those that really cared had lost their niche. The early adopters surfing on the edge of a wave were not prepared for it to crash on the beach.
I am not a regular but I still had 2008 to compare with and this year certainly seemed to be some kind of tipping point. Where were the breakthroughs? Where were the new memes that will carry us into and through the next innovation horizon?
All the panels I wanted to attend seemed to be on simultaneously. Then when there was 10 minutes between events there was 20 minutes of travel to get to a distant hotel conference room. As a result I struggled to cover half of what I wanted to see. I took little comfort in the fact that in order to find out more, chasing people up who’d been to these panels returned the common response “meh”.
Soggy
With all the tech saturation everything felt… well, wet and soggy. I was proud to be asked to talk about location based app LoveFre.sh as it’s based on discovering local produce and the people around it. Just using the app dropped me into peoples lives that were passionately going about their business because they cared.
It was this same theme of local that took me into the streets meeting the local community and those living locally during the festival.
There was also great insight to be had from the SXSW old timers: they knew where to go to find the pockets of reality amongst the cash-encrusted carnival. One of the high points of the week was being introduced to the Frey Cafe tucked away in the back of the Red Eye Fly bar. Ewan Spence led the way and the night was filled with magic. In it’s 11th year Frey cafe was unbranded & untouched since it’s origins. It was real life storytelling at it’s finest. But for how long? Just the presence of the festival in the city pushes the rents up on all spaces no matter how small and hidden away. These gems are being driven underground.
Also my conversation with Adriana Lukas on Self Hacking went a long way to restoring my faith in humanity…
At least the humanity that was in attendance. We need more disruption, more disrupters and do-ers. If the masses are now going to be shovelling data into the web like everyone else.. Where are the artists, the chefs who will make sense of it all and present us up beautiful bite-sized chunks that we can not only share with those around us… but that we can get excited about as we dwell upon relevance?
Empathy
All this relentless shovelling is just leaving a hole where meaning used to be. Show us how these technologies make life better. That is all. Because it can you know.
The free alcohol-induced hedonistic nights left a bitter taste in my mouth when I woke to hear the news in Japan. It was mobile tech and social platforms that were getting the news to me.
In talking to those around me on the streets of SXSW I found an empathy I felt was lacking in the halls and auditoriums. It wasn’t easy to reach out across the world to a nation in need other than to chuck money in their direction in the hope that would make their problems go away.
Offline
This is just the beginning. We have the users: let us hone the use. Buzzwords of Game Layers and the Gamification of education are just words without the social interaction these mechanisms seem to rely on. My offline interactions were way more rewarding than my online ones. The social tools I used enabled me to find the people I wanted to share physical space with.
I came away from SXSW 2011 with realisations very different to what I’d expected.
Our fate seems to be in the hands of the digital shepherds, the designer/developers who in my opinion need to display our time-based data intertwined with our geographic data. I think it’s been given a fancy name like Geotemporal Visualization.
Easily accessible time/space data sets done well are necessary if innovative collaborations are to create some kind of empathic strands that span out to link our online relationships.
The SXSW interactive festival made me want to unplug and turn everything off. Only for a moment though. I found that turning on just a few channels, a back channel, a transmission frequency and a slight turn of the ‘squelch’ dial to allow just enough background conversation in …and I was re-engaged.
I am still looking for the balance of on vs. off. I am still looking for the niche.
Isn’t the point now that everything and anything can be found online but our most treasured interactions still tend to be in real life? No gchat, email, tweet, etc can match a proper conversation where you can see and gauge people’s true emotions and feelings and really bounce off each other. I’ll throw my Air and Android away then. Or maybe not.
Adriana says ‘social media is dead as an agent of change’ – true for some players. Less true for the smaller establishments – I’m thinking regional museums for example, for them it’s a total revolution talking to their audiences, interacting and finding out what they think. People are still playing catch up.
I’m talking ‘Hacking Culture’ at FutureEverything and think Adriana’s point of view is very very interesting. Would love to hear more.
http://futureeverything.org/conference-3/hacking-culture/
Katy, yes, online is wonderful, with endless possibilities etc etc. Face to face still wins though technology can enhance connections between people just like it can enhance other aspects of our lives – but rarely replace. Such statements verge on platitudes and vague generalisations, so I prefer to focus on specific areas that increase individual’s autonomy, such as self-hacking. 🙂
I will stand by my statement that social media is dead… here’s the original post I did a couple of years ago (and that was written after a couple of years knowing it to be true http://www.mediainfluencer.net/2010/03/social-media-is-dead/). It’s not about smaller establishments catching up, that’s fine and beneficial. It is about how much social media is going to change organisations. The hope that people like me had when we got excited about ‘social media’ back in 2003 was that it will break down hierarchies in the most spectacular ways and change the nature of the relationship between individuals and systems/institutions. Well, not quite that naive though the fervent hope was there, burning in the background and driving our efforts. Over the years, social media has become another checkbox on marketer’s list without fundamentally changing (or doing away with entirely of) the marketer. Social media for me was squarely in the area of individual empowerment, whether for individual bloggers or for people within organisations.
Self-hacking is a continuation of this, at least for me, as it can help understand and change/improve ourselves on our own terms. But we need the right tools, techniques and expertise, which is what the Self-hacking group (London QS meetup) is about. http://www.meetup.com/LondonQS/
I was very interested to see your strapline of ‘breaking out of pigeonholes’ as that’s the way I’ve felt for the last, oh I dunno, 10 years! Trying to bring ideas across the organisation, connected thinking and interactivity to beyond the marketing department.
The problem with ‘social media’ is that it’s been give a label and put in a box. The whole web is social – it’s just people (clients, orgs) have had to stick a budget code to it. Frustrating and it doesn’t help push things forward.
What I am finding though (from a culture angle), is that it’s not just the marketing teams that are interested in learning more about social, but curators, learning, archives, etc are all realising the benefits of a joined up and creative approach to using the tools we have currently online, which can only be a good thing.