This is my last post on SXSW. It may be the most important one though. As I’ve written, I went to SXSW thinking it would be a tech event. I’ve come back to London with the realization that it’s not about bits and bytes. It’s about people. It’s about the keynotes and the audience who take on those keynote speakers. It’s about regular panels and the individuals who stand up and wait for a turn to ask a question at the mic. And it’s about all those lunatics who see a twitter calling for a mid-afternoon tweet-up at a random bar and despite knowing nobody turn up and make friends. Thanks for that twitter.

I would like to briefly go through some standout panels and keynotes at SXSW. He was subsequently outshone, or certainly out hyped by other big guns, but for me Henry Jenkins really brought his A-Game. Thesis: Society and its leaders and its media are switching from an ‘I’ culture to a ‘we’ culture. Examples: Survivor and Lost’s level of audience participation. These prime time shows do not exist without their online audience examining every last secret detail of every frame of every episode.
Exampe: Barack Obama talks using the post-boomer inclusivity language of ‘We’. Hillary Clinton does not. ‘I’ plays a big part in Clinton’s speeches and represents a person born of a political generation that wholeheartedly embraces the one way medium of TV. That’s over Mrs. Clinton.
Daniel light adds to Jenkins’ thesis in his excellent post:

“This isn’t presented as happening at the expense of individuality or self-determination. On the contrary, this is not communism but communalism, seeing the interests of the community best served by the divergent creativity and initiative of we, its constituents.”

Social Networks such as Twitter and Seesmic are obvious manifestations of this communalism. They represent the audacity and urgency of intimacy that I think Jenkins talks about.

Mark Zuckerberg
A whole ton of stuff has been written about the Zukerberg/Lacy interview. It was a cringe worthy affair. So what, let’s get on with the show. Neither Zuckerberg nor Lacy came across as particularly interesting individuals in person, but I do want to examine a few points Zuck tried to get out between acts of audience revolt. Sure, audience participation via online social network back channels is interesting but not in a huge manner right now. Come on, this is one of the biggest geek fests on the planet, if it’s going to happen anywhere it’s going to happen here.

One interesting side note is the reference Zuck makes to how Facebook is helping revolutionaries in Colombia. Look at the Guardian piece on FB’s backers. Is this thus a huge surprise. Government and big business have sought to control information and access to information since mankind invented media. ie forever. The reformation was enabled by Guttenberg’s wresting of information control from the Catholic church after all. If I’m the CIA, you better believe I want to control, or at the very least have readily available access to these information paths.

One worry here is that as with Google, as large corporations start to gain an ownership on our information and relationships they can massage these in different ways. McLuhan’s statement on medium and message rings true. Our thoughts and the way we think adapts to the medium. Control that and control the message.

Zuck stated quite audaciously that Facebook represents the biggest paradigm shift in media since the launch of the newspaper industry. Maybe he’s actually right, did anyone think of that?

Newspapers didn’t shift society’s thought functionality on their own, it took the invention and adoption of the telegraph to put them over the edge. The telegraph removed the limitations of space and time on the newspaper industry. The newspaper press was then free to become the first medium to involve human interest and sentiment en masse. With that the telegraph ultimately dimmed the privacy of the book form.

Nearly 200 years later social networks are doing a similar job in dismantling barriers of intimacy in our communications. The generation of school children on Bebo has grown up with almost a complete, non-technological, tool set to use social networks to communicate.

Commentators in their twenties and older wonder how this generation is going to grow up and hit the work force with all their teenage trials and tribulations shared online for the potential employer to vet. But that isn’t the employee’s problem. They are comfortable with their shared intimacy. It’s the employer who’s going to have to deal with it. In the past decade we’ve had two presidents in the US and a leader of the opposition in the UK who have crossed this Rubicon in terms of records and recollections of student drug usage. This is surely the start of a societal change from punishing past indiscretions to an open acknowledgment of mistakes.

We’ve already stated that the newspaper press wasn’t the catalyst for the changing of media consumption in the 1800’s. It was the Telegraph. And so social networks. Flash AJAX deployments and integrated APIs aren’t the killer app here. These aren’t changing society. But what might do that that is the integration of mobile devices. This is why Google is spending so much on Android and wireless. It may be that Social Networks will finally come of age and be the instruments of change that MZ proports them to be when they fully embrace a mobile world. This is the only way they are going to penetrate Africa for example.

So to Frank Warren
I’ve been a fan of PostSecret since I first saw it in some Sunday supplement or another. It’s collage like art/intimacy I think connects with a lot of people. We’ve all got something hidden inside us.

However seeing Warren’s name up beside Jenkins and Zuckerberg was something of a surprise. This guy’s an artist/currator. How does that fit into an interactive conference?

Well let’s look at what interactive means. Warren has created more direct interactions than perhaps anyone in the auditorium. And on an incredibly intimate level. It’s fair to say that Warren knows how to extract the intimate in just about anyone. The hour long talk featured quite a few tales of anonymous secrets, but the amazing thing was what this outpouring of secrets did to the audience. The Q&A section, or rather mass secret section produced one spontaneous proposal of marriage, lots of confessions and one hug from Frank for a woman who fell into floods of teams in front of 2,000 super-geeks. Wow. Nothing I write here can do him justice. Some of his talks are online. Find them.

Four points from Jane McGonigal’s talk on the happiness industry. All recent research on happiness points to four key areas that are pre-requisites for bringing happiness to a life:

1. Satisfying work to do
2. The experience of being good at something
3. Time spent with people we like
4. A chance to be a part of something bigger

What’s this to do with interactive? Jane’s a multi-player game expert. And multiplayer games bring all four of these in spades. If your industry doesn’t it’s time to think why not.

So on to other highlights. George Kelly gave the most sombre talk of the weekend. He read like a Telegraph obit. The funeral was that of the newspaper industry and George obviously cares. Not that that’s going to stop the declining sales, slash and burn approach to the world’s news rooms and a mass exodus of advertisers to green online pastures.
That leaves me with this question though which I want to explore over the coming months. is it a given that these forms of communication and participation will jump the gap between international geek community and mass adoption. Facebook has done it, but can Twitter and Seesmic really go mass market in their current guise or will they simply be sold off for their API’s. Does the real innovation lie in ancillilary apps?

Finally some learnings at a basic level. Despite our web 2.0 tools it’s vital to connect in a real way, not just at a Facebook or MySpace level. Without real interaction, and maybe even face to face communication these web2.0 relationships do not mean a whole lot. Gary Vaynurchuck understands this. Watch how he communicates with his audience. But big media doesn’t. It they get Facebook, Myspace and Twitter, it’s at a marketing level. Useless.

Nike is a company that I find absolutely offensive for their continued outsourcing/labour issues, BUT they get this. They are using their brand and social status to connect people in the real world. More companies need to get this too. And like Nike they may well be companies that haven’t done this before. If you work in the world of sport, an area that is invented to accomodate social interaction you better be thinking this or you’re going to be left way out by your audience.