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…
I remember when “call waiting” was introduced by our local phone company in the late 1970’s. It was considered a really useful technology, in that, if you were waiting for an important call, you could still take other calls in the mean time. However, as our society became ever more obsessed with newer, faster, more immediate gratification, it revealed its dark side: it made people rude.