Posts Tagged ‘gnomedex’
More Random Notes from Gnomedex 9.0
August 23rd, 2009
Gnomedex is fundamentally about the why of social media, and not about the how. In other words, it’s not aimed at the engineers or the infrastructure, but how technology works to bring people together.
Nowhere was this more apparent than in the presentation by FoldIt, a video game for protein folding.
Wait, what?
A team at the University of Washington is doing advanced research in protein folding—this is critical because how a protein can be folded often determines if it’s benign of causes some nasty disease. The mechanism, in the case, is a video game (you can download it from the link above). The research team discovered that people, in playing the game (trying to fold a protein to a “low-energy state”), are much more efficient than computer simulations. Because of the large number of degrees of freedom, the task is computationally extremely expensive. By using a video game as the medium, the protein folding achieves better results, faster. In this case, there’s nothing new about the medium (video games have been around for years), but the purpose (curing diseases and advancing medical research) is extraordinarily novel.
Another novel presentation was by the creator of the Maker Bot, a 3D printer that can rapidly create any desired solid objects. By leveraging the power of the social community, the device has achieved far more than a dedicated team (in a closed company) might have done. In essence, the business is leveraging volunteer labor for the greater good.
Observing Social Media At Work
August 21st, 2009
I’m attending the first day of Gnomedex 9.0 in Seattle. It’s billed as “a conference of inspiration and influence,” and it offers a fascinating insight into the current (leading edge) of the Internet’s expanding sphere of influence.
Everyone here has a computer. Ok, not everyone, but it’s such a rarity to not have a laptop in front of you that it stands out like a sore thumb. People within my view are writing blog posts on Wordpress, viewing Twitter, playing Fold It, and some, nay, most people have multiple applications and windows open at once. We’re in a section of the conference called “Ignite” that is focused on rapid-fire, 5-minute presentations with 20 slides or less. A whole crew of people from FriendFeed are seated behind me, commenting on the conference in real-time and responding to my responses, often in seconds.
The conference is social, indeed—people are not just listening, but they’re interacting with each other, even though they’re not talking. There are a dozen different forms of media in use: video, audio, Twitter, FriendFeed, web, iPhone, TweetDeck, and many, many more. There are digital cameras, and video cameras, and projectors, and billboards, and a dozen other attention-diverting messaging tools. It’s not like a movie theater, where the lights are dimmed to focus attention on the screen; here, the stage is actually a bit darker than the rest of the auditorium. It’s as if the speaker himself/herself is insignificant, and the focus is on the screen behind him/her.
And that, in fact, is the point.
Social media is not about people; it’s about interactions. Social media occurs when two or more people are together: speaking, fighting, sharing, talking, laughing, photographing, and interacting in a hundred other ways. There are people who think that, if you let people comment on your blog, then you’re engaging in social media. Those people are sadly mistaken. The power of social media is in the engagement and interaction of people, not in the technologies that enable it. It’s the modern equivalent of the medieval mead-hall, the Roman forum, or the American frontier village. It’s uncensored, unmoderated, and near anarchy, and that is both its power and its curse; it’s powerful yet destabilizing.
Stay tuned for further updates…
