SXSWi Recap…
Monday, March 21st, 2005Spent the past few days mulling over the heady experience of South by Southwest Interactive…I’ve been thinking out loud to a few friends in the time since I got back on Wed. night, and I think I’ve processed enough to put some ideas down on screen. So, without further ado…
Why was it important for me to go to Austin for 5 days?
I’ve been trying to put my finger on exactly what it is about the SXSWi experience that was so damn valuable – I know it was, but trying to put it into words is more than a bit tricky. Yes, the sessions are great, but as any veteran of the academic conference circuit knows, you don’t ultimately go to a conference for the sessions; they’re there as nucleation sites, a sort of lowest common denominator that gets a lot of smart, interesting people in the same space thinking about particular issues.
The easy answer is that the value of a conference like SXSWi lies in the people you meet, and that gets closer to the meat of it. Put simply, the people I met were amazing. I made a ton of new friends, and even more new contacts – the experience was rewarding on both personal and professional levels. I’m still processing the sheaf of business cards I picked up in Austin, and I’ll likely spend a good chunk of this week writing followup e-mails.
However, there’s something more to it than that. Much hay has been made about my little experience with Ben Brown during the Wonkette keynote he put out a request for a photo for his Austinist blog, and I responded, took one and sent it to him.
Joshua and I posted a virtual message on a message board that did not exist physically, but was tied to a specific location. He responded, and was able to take advantage of his slightly better vantage point to record a notable experience. He transmitted a digital photo, first over a wire, then over the airwaves to me, where I transferred it over airwaves then wires to a server somewhere in New York. While the notable event was still occuring, two strangers collaborated to share the event with the world, and record it for posterity. It all took about three minutes.
I’ll admit that this was a pretty cool use of the technology, but in the grand scheme of the conference, it was pretty minor. I’m used to being on the bleeding edge of technology adoption, but I’m not used to being surrounded by hundreds of others who are as well…for five days in Austin, I lived, learned, talked, ate and drank in a sort of utopian world where everyone else used digital/online tools as seamlessly and fluently as I do, and I got to see what that could mean:
- It meant that up to several hundred people popped up on my laptop’s Rendezvous screen during every session; what Ben mentions in passing is that most people used their iChat status line to indicate their physical location (which session, where in the room). I wasn’t limited to my preexisting “Buddy List” and could form new contacts based on spatial proximity and shared experience, striking up conversations about the session in which I was sitting or asking about the content of another one. I’d read about this before (see the discussion of “SSID messaging” at DIS 2004), but experiencing it was something altogether different, and oddly comfortable.
- It meant that I never once had to hear someone say the words “Could you e-mail that photo to me?” Everyone used Flickr, and the process of tagging and sharing individual photos of an event became so common that that by dinner on the last night, our esteemed host stood up, cleared his throat and announced the Flickr tag for the evening. The experience of taking for granted the frictionless sharing and juxtaposition of tangible traces like photos, notes, etc… was just remarkable.
- It meant that I saw my first tangibly real-time use of a wiki, as my new friend Kevin and his colleagues from AOL posted their remarkably-detailed session notes to a specially-set-up Wiki, and I saw for the first time in practice exactly how valuable collaborative information technologies can be on a more local (as opposed to the macro-scale wikipedia-esque) level. From here on out, I’m going to do something similar for every academic conference I attend, and I think it’ll change the way I perceive my notes.
It meant, in short, that everything worked the way that I imagine it working, the technological and to social merging seamlessly in the tech-world equivalent of actually living the theory as opposed to the often-frustrating practice. That’s not to say that the technological subsumed the social – in fact, far from it. Rather, it’s that they augmented each other frictionlessly, enabling actions and abilities that would usually be much more difficult (if not well nigh impossible).
To me, this was the real value of SXSW; the wicked-cool Molly writes that “SXSW coalesces a platform — a human platform,” but I’d argue that it’s simpler than this…at the risk of losing my detached, analytical academic cred, SXSW is a space for people who’re inventing the future to actually live it for a few days. It’s a future where you can make an entirely technologically-mediated connection one moment, and later that night find yourself swapping Moleskines with someone because you’re throwing so many ideas/references/literatures at each other that it’s easier to just write them directly in each others’ notebooks (in a sense, right into each others’ external mental storage).
So, aside from all that, what’d you learn?
There were a few big-picture points that I took away from my sessions and conversations, some of which were new, and some of which confirmed things I’d already been thinking. I’ll be mulling these over in this space over the next few weeks (in particular, how they might apply to the kinds of projects on which we’re working at the Center), but for the moment, here are a few things I think are breaking over the horizon:
- Syndication – we’re well past the point where RSS is novel, but the core philosophy of sending out raw feeds of information is still very much in its embryonic stages of practical use. In a sense, the idea is a natural consequence of the divorce of “content” and “style” that’s been pushed by CSS proponents, but its real uses are just being explored now; think of what Flickr does with its streamed feeds of photos, or del.icio.us’ feeds of links. This is something about which I’ve been thinking for some time, and have already been building into our tools (more on that as soon as I write the damn documentation), but I think there’s a lot more thinking to be done about the potential uses of syndication writ large.
- Tagging – I’ve seen the future, and it’s piling, not filing. The Flickr thing alone could’ve convinced me, but the work that Technorati’s doing with aggregating tags from multiple sources is brilliant, and holds a lot of promise for how one might create resources from disparate collections without requiring some sort of top-down order. (I hear this was also a prominent theme at O’Reilly’s Emerging Technologies conference, which seems to be a sort of sister – or, given the unfortunate gender balance, perhaps “brother” is a better word – to SXSWi.) Again, something I’ve been thinking about for a while, but there’s now some new fuel for the fire.
- Aggregation – Maybe the most valuable session for me was the awesomely-titled How to Leverage Solipsism (notes here). I’m reading Surowiecki’s book, and I’m convinced that there are some very interesting things to be done by aggregating the individual (and self-oriented) actions of the many…I need to look more closely at Cite-U-Like, though I think that what I’m talking about is bigger than merely a del.icio.us for academic papers. We’ve got a grant application pending to build a Firefox plugin to aid scholarly work, and while there are definite problems raised by conflating so-called “solipsistic” (or self-oriented) actions with public ones, I definitely need to think more about how we might hop on the aggregation wagon.
- Games vs. narratives – Maybe the most unexpected insight of the conference came after dragging myself out of bed after only 3 hours of sleep for a 10 am session on Story Structure and Mobile Media …I’d never seen the tension between narrative and “game-like” interactivity quite so clearly, not had it occurred to me that insights from the world of game-design might offer explicit directions for some of our projects at the Center; in particular, we’ve been thinking a bit lately about how to embed history in geographic space using mobile devices, and while it was incredibly valuable to hear several researchers speak about their own work with mobile media, it was the game designer on the panel who really blew my mind, throwing into sharp relief the assumptions that I’d taken for granted about what it meant to “do history” using mobile tech. Again, much to mull over here.
- XFN – The notion of embedding more nuanced relationships into the very architecture of hyperlinks is brilliant, and the analogies to scholarly citations and other ways of defining a network beyond the commonplace “friends and family” are spilling out of my head faster than I can capture them on paper.
Those are just a few of the high points off the top of my head; I’ll spend much of tomorrow going over notes and briefing the gang at CHNM, so I’m sure more will follow shortly. For now, I’ll just say hi again to all my new friends and colleagues (new blogroll is forthcoming), and thanks again to Kevin, who for years has been telling me that I needed to get myself to SXSWi; he was so damn right.
