Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Just one more...Lance Ulanoff captures the serendipity of SXSW and why
people go and keep coming back. There is something very special about
talking to anyone, great or small, in a relaxed environment,about the
things you love.

http://mashable.com/2012/03/14/sxsw-2012-wrap/
  

    
We're still going strong at SXSW - last night we saw local jazz
luminary Jeff Lofton play at the Elephant Room, then saw the Australian
film "The Hunter" with Willem Dafoe at the Alamo. Back downtown we
wandered around in the world east of Congress (but still west of IH35).
We picked up on a distinction between east and west of Congress - east
has a lot of smaller clubs and free events. This is where you find
very young people without badges wandering, drinking, dancing. It's
pretty surreal. 

My artist friend Warren McKinney (who produces the Art Outside event)
was commissioned to create a giant simulated Dorito machine near
Carmelo's. He told me that people would be able to climb a stairway,
step into the coin slot, and slide down. I didn't see that part of it,
but it was an impressive commercial installation.

We caught a little of Japan night, then an amazing set by Blitzen
Trapper - probably the best experience I've had so far this year at
SXSW.

You asked about the challenges of throwing a big event like this - I
think you start small and grow organically. It would be hard to do
something like this coming to it cold. I suspect they now have more
infrastructure than any one person or entity could track - i.e. you
have to build a bureaucracy around it and scale it up.

I don't agree with Ed, but I've already said what I think. People are
not staring zombie-like into screens - there's generally somebody, or
somebodies, on the other side. That's not exactly the way to say it:
people are forming networks of interaction that they follow through
their devices. When they stare into their screens, they're connecting -
the screen is portal through they access their networks. Think about
Howard Rheingold's "Shibuya epiphany." 

And the people I'm connected to were all meeting like crazy and
hashing out ideas.
  

    
Jon, that is the joy of a Festival. And maybe people forget that SXSW
is a festival; a smorgasbord for the senses. The whole point is to be
able to wander... experience the ideas, people, media. It's going to be
different for everyone who attends; highs, lows, serendipities. Where
else can you get this concentrated sense of what's happening on the Net
and in digital culture?

Sure, we haven't integrated it yet. There's too much, all at once, for
any of us to take in. I got rid of my smartphone this past year. I
don't want to be connected 24/7 and 'always on'. It's too much of a
distraction for me. (I think I lack the discipline to use it as a tool,
rather than become a tool of it; may go back to it later).

But I get that a new generation is coming up that IS 'always on'. The
beauty of SXSW is that you can go and sample and see what works for
you, get a sense of how others are using tech, and a peek at what's
coming. 
  

    
As for what's coming our own Bruce Sterling (bruces) waxes eloquent:

"[There's] a new phenomena that I like to call the Stacks [vertically
integrated social media]. And we've got five of them -- Google,
Facebook, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft. The future of the stacks is
basically to take over the internet and render it irrelevant. They're
not hostile to the internet -- they're just [looking after] their own
situation. And they all think they'll be the one Stack... and render
the others irrelevant. And they'll all be rendered irrelevant. That's
the future of the Stacks."

(via Huffington Post's the Best Quotes
(http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/13/bruce-sterling-sxsw-2012_n_1343353.ht
ml)

Would you like to comment on that Jon?
  

    
Ed. What's the state of the 4th estate? This question spins off the
last one to Jon. As we have experienced the tsunami of social media,
has journalism been swept to the shore as flotsam and jetsam? Or is
there something hopeful occurring? Everyone's attention to 'social'
seems to have rendered journalism to the back seat. And that would be a
danger IMHO.

I've been a journalism junkie my entire life, via every media. And I
think I make good use of the tools of technology to keep up and fairly
well informed. Maybe I've always been in the minority in that respect.
But I really feel in the minority now.
  

    
For those who could not attend SXSW 2012, Ogilvy Notes has captured
visualizations of many of the major panels. Fantastic work.

http://ogilvynotes.com/49790/sxsw-2012
  

    
I have seen no reason to be optimistic about journalism at SXSW. The
novelty of the new media is very much still with us (media is so
slow-moving that this will take years to abate), and everyone is still
reveling in the faux democracy of current content providers. Hell, you
yourself just linked to the no-pay aggregator Huffington Post, one of
the chief villains in this situation. 

There was less even on the music side this year to hold my interest,
which is obviously my problem, not theirs. The Springsteen keynote was
excellent, our panel, "They Used to Call it Classical," got a
surprisingly large number of attendees and was a very lively
conversation, but downtown has become such a clusterfuck that I didn't
see a single band this year. Nor do I particularly regret it: I have no
idea who any of them were.
  

    
This video that I shot downtown yesterday gives you a sense of the
crowd: http://youtu.be/KMlii8AddaE

Much of what's happening downtown as the festival shifts from
Interactive to Music is not formally part of SXSW, and many of the
people downtown haven't registered for the event, they've come for all
the residual effects. Most of my Interactive friends were long gone by
yesterday.

To Ed's point, there are many marginal-to-bad bands playing the last
half of the week; finding the good stuff is needle/haystack crazy. I
saw good performances, but I was selective. Top of my list: Jim White,
who unfortunately only had a half hour to play at the Continental Club,
which was inconvenient to reach - I walked in the door a couple
minutes before he started playing. That inconvenience in reaching the
acts (or panels) you really want to see is a pervasive issue at SXSW as
it sprawls over the city. Traffic's impenetrable at times. To catch
Jim White I walked a mile from the Big Star event, drove to south
Austin, luckly found a parking spot a half mile from the Continental
Club, and hoofed it to get there.

The Big Star event I mention was a screening of the excellent
work-in-progress Big Star documentary, "Nothing Can Hurt Me," and the
magical tribute that followed. Big Star drummer and sole survivor Jody
Stephens, working with Chris Stamey, put together an assortment of
musicians to play all the songs from Third/Sisters and Lovers. This is
the sort of thing that only happens at an event like SXSW.

Aside from Jim White and Big Star, the highlight of music for me was
the Friday 1am performance by Blitzen Trapper at the Red 7 club
downtown, which I already mentioned.

Yesterday was day 9 of SXSW for us, which means we'd been going full
steam for over a week and, when we slowed down enough to notice,
realized we were exhausted. We saw "America's Parking Lot," a very good
documentary about how the Dallas Cowboys' move to their new
billion-dollar-plus stadium affected tailgaters who'd staked out
specific territory outside the old Texas Stadium. The documenary gets
into the political economics of the contemporary NFL, how you have to
pay exorbitant license feeds just to have a right to buy tickets, which
have also become very expensive. Ordinary working stiffs can't afford
to get into the games anymore, at least not without sacrifice. A
tailgater named Cy Ditmore has put off construction of a new home in
order to buy the PSL (personal seat license) and tickets. Director
Jonny Mars was passionate about his material, and it shows in the film.
I wondered if he would get distribution, go straight to DVD - or
possibly the film would never reach a wider audience. The latter is
less likely in this world of broadly distributed media, but if he does
get distribution he might not realize much of a return.  SXSW and any
film festival is about seeing films that might be hard to see
elsewhere, and the SXSW fest is particularly well curated for
compelling oddities by film lead Janet Pierson and her team.

We had a minor family emergency to deal with and made it downtown too
late for much of what we had planned, so we wandered through the whacky
green St. Patrick's Day crowd on 6th Street until we reached Esther's
Follies, Austin's celebrated comedy/burlesque venue, and hung in there
for a bit of bad comedy and a drink. At that point we realized we were
done. I had an ambitious list of shows I wanted to catch, but I was
running on fumes. And I realized I'd done more at SXSW that over the
last week than guys half my age would ever attempt. 
  

    
I wanted to give you a feel for Film and Music, but we're here to talk
about Interactive, and we have a couple of weeks to talk about the
event and the scene.

Ed and I have a different take on the state of journalism from our
different perspectives. We've both been involved in old-school print
journalism, but I never depended strictly on writing to make a living,
and though I've been writing all my life, most of my published work has
appeared post-Internet and has been about digital culture. I've given
a lot of my writing away.

There are many writers like me around today, and the long tail
aggregate of semiprofessional authors who have other sources of income
is taking mindshare from professional journalists. Because there is
much good content available online more or less for free, professional
writers find themselves competing with that price point, i.e.
writing/blogging for little or no money.

This is a difficult situation, one that I've spent a lot of time
considering. The problem isn't just that there's so much digital
content and so much of it is free. It's that we're in a transition and
we're not clear about the business model for quality content.
Advertising is not the best or only model, but it's the prevalent model
currently. On the Internet, as with televsion, this means that the
customers are the advertisers and the readers/users/consumers are the
product. The creation and publication of content is part of the process
of acquiring product, and its value is based on how well it commands
attention. In the Internet era, there's an additonal dimension: how
relevant the content is to the advertiser's business - will it attract
users who will "convert," as in clicking through an ad and actually
buying the advertiser's goods.  

The Internet also facilitates long tail advertising: rather than
placing ads in a few places where there will be attention and
relevance, you can place ads in many places where there is less
attention per placement, and still some assessment of relevance - this
is what Google is about. Google is an advertising company that supports
long tail advertising, i.e. many lower cost ad placements with some
sense of relevance, determined algorithmically. They've created a whole
new market for advertising, auctioning attention based on keyword
assessments and complex algorithms for delivering the goods
(consumers).

We're just starting to get our heads around this new environment and
how it works. At the same time the "stacks" Bruce Sterling mentioned
are struggling for dominance of the environment, competing from their
different approaches. E.g. Google tries to compete by leveraging the
Internet as a whole, and Facebook tries to compete by offering an
walled-garden overlay for the Internet experience. 

I know smart people who think and talk about the evolution of the
Internet, and it's what I study and think about every day. I don't know
anybody who's got clarity about the future five or ten years out.  The
scene we're in is complex, and there are many strange attractors.

My sense was that the Interactive crowd at SXSW this year was mostly
people with nothing new to say, because we've been in persistent
accelerated innovation mode for so long, and we've hit a wall. We're at
a point where we could and probably should stop and look deeply into
what we've built so far, and consider how it all works, and how to make
it work sustainably. How we can make ourselves better through evolving
cyborganics. There was some sense of this at SXSW this year, but I
think we were somewhere between innovation and going deeper.

Underneath it all, I'm realizing there was a sense that it could all
fall part. A real anxiety beneath the glossy surfaces and marketing
hype.
  

    
I'm glad to hear you say that, since you're far deeper into the whole
picture than I am. As that blog entry for realeyz up above shows, I
didn't get a whole lot except buzzwords from one of the panels, and had
a kind of deja-vu experience with the rest. There'll be another
realeyz blog on Wednesday dealing with sharing and what it does and
doesn't mean to me.
  

    
And meanwhile my editor put this up:

<http://www.realeyz.tv/en/blog/events/who-put-the-glomp.html>
  

    
One of the finest sermons on Rock and Roll I've ever heard, by
the Rev. Bruce Springsteen, SXSW 2012 Keynote:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWVp7NBp9XU
  

    
From Roy Christopher's wrap up of SXSW:

The internet has made fame much easier and fortune nearly impossible.

(http://roychristopher.com/temporary-eponymous-zone-sxsw-2012)

That seems to speak to Ed's conundrum. There's quite a lot of talk
about digital (k)nomads and how everyone in GenX is going to be a
contractor or consultant. We are fairly unique in the WELL to have a
2nd generation of Wellperns which gives us a flavor and perspective
other social sites lack. It would be great if some of the younger
(under 35) folk would chime in both about SXSW and digital culture in
general.

Do you have a sense of an unlimited future enhanced by tech or do you
sense some of that "fear of collapse" Jon mentions?

As Bruce Springsteen echoed Bob Dylan, "How does it feel to be on your
own"? Or do you truly feel connected?
  

    
Maybe you should invite some folks from the GenX conference to join
our conversation. (Is there a conference for the children of the
GenXers?)

I was jut reading the Lance Ulanoff post where he says it's all
happening in the ambient realm - in the halls, not in the sessions.
That's been true of every good conference I've ever attended, so it's
not surprising. I suppose you can excuse the dropping of names in that
post as his attempt to make the point that prominent Internet folks
tend to show up, but if you're hanging out with  Robert Scoble, Ed
Baig, Guy Kawasaki, Andy Cohen, Tony Hsieh, Steve Case, Tobey MacGuire,
Craig Newmark etc., you're not exactly looking for the cutting edge.

Bruce Sterling told me that the one new thing he saw was Londoner
James Bridle on "The New Aesthetic"
(http://www.riglondon.com/blog/2011/05/06/the-new-aesthetic/). I wish
I'd met that guy and caught his panel, but it didn't happen. Here's a
talk he gave at New Directions South in Australia:
http://booktwo.org/notebook/waving-at-machines/.  Reminds me of Amber
Case - these are philosopher/designers who totally inhabit now, without
the conceptual baggage many of us older farts carry forward from our
experience of mass media, mass marketing, print culture, greed culture,
etc. I.e. they're farther along in the cyborganic evolution.

It's hard to imagine this guy and the likes of Robert Scoble and Guy
Kawasaki showing up at the same conference, but that's SXSW. The new
monkeys hop on the dinosaurs and ride.
  

    
Thx Jon, I did. Boy are they having a good time on that forum. You
could make a blog post just on the topic titles!

"cyborganic" ...catchy phrase, captures cyber and the borg at the same
time.

<The new monkeys hop on the dinosaurs and ride.> You are waxing
eloquent today Jon. Didn't Dave Matthews write a song about that?

<without the conceptual baggage many of us older farts carry
forward...>
That's a mouthful and an excellent point. Part of the magic of SXSW is
that it can help break those boxes, but as I continue graying I'm
realizing there's a gap that can only be breached by listening.
  

    
No conference for GenX's kids. We don't have parental controls to
limit them to some version of SpongeBob Squarepants or iCarly, but
you're right, we are into the third generation now.
  

    

millenials! 
  

    
what i liked best about sxsw this year was bumping into people i hadn't
seen, often, in years. all day, every day. it made this now giant show feel
almot human-scaled. there are too many panels at the same time (often 30+)
in the interactive track, but the greatest value for me was, as i say, in
the hallways.
  

    
Margaret, we should start thinking up a catch phrase for the next
batch! What are we going to call the generation following the
millenials?

Suzanne, I saw that over and over again in the Twittersphere comments.
People meeting F2F for the first time, having had a virtual
relationship for many years, and reacquaintances as well. 

Amazing how much of our lives is virtual now.
  

    
Jon, non-sanctioned events were a big issue last year. Was that much
of a problem this year?
  

    
Ed, you made a great comment about the way kids listen to music, in
last year's SXSW conversation:

<This also goes to the heart of why kids today can't understand why
their parents got so wrapped up in the music of their era. We don't
understand that their relationship to music is utterly different and
that it's far less emotionally central to their cultural world-view,
no
matter how passionately they seem to follow this or that band or
scene. So what's the big deal about the Beatles? They were just a
band.>

It seems to me that you could put the word 'media' in the place of
'music' and pretty much catch the zeitgeist. The way they (and now,we,
to a great extent) listen to media has become background noise, amidst
all the chaff of a constantly streaming data flow. You really have to
go out of your way to filter all the noise, just to be able to actually
hear something. 

In the older days -- ten years ago -- we used to say you have about 8
seconds to catch someone's attention on a web site. That was in the
days of 'pull'. Now we live in the days of 'push and pull', media
streams trying to catch our attention by pushing data in our direction,
as well as pulling our attention to their sites. I think it's down to
about 4 seconds now. Does anyone even surf anymore - who has time? That
used to be a great joy of mine, just puttering away following link
after link and serendipitously discovering new things. Now I use
aggregators and dashboards for that. Hurumph!

Your thoughts?
  

    
Cyborganic is a word I came up with in the 90s, derived from the word
"cyborg," which is a mashup of "cybernetic organism." I first saw the
word "cyborg" in a forgotten comic book in the 1960s. The idea of the
cyborg is older, but the term itself appeared in 1960, coined by
Manfred E. Clynes and Nathan S. Kline: "For the exogenously extended
organizational complex functioning as an integrated homeostatic system
unconsciously, we propose the term ‘Cyborg'." They were working on the
psychophysiological apsects of space flight. The New York Times,
reporting on their work, wrote "a cyborg is essentially a man-machine
system in which the control mechanisms of the human portion are
modified externally by drugs or regulatory devices so that the being
can live in an environment different from the normal one."

Around 1992 0r 1993, when I was an editor at bOING bOING (the
magazine), Mark Frauenfelder asked me what title I wanted, and I said
"cyborganic jivemeister." Not long after, an online community founded
by Jonathan Steuer had the same name. Google the term and you get
around 22K hits, so it's been used here and there; I think it's a
useful word to describe what many of us have been talking about for the
last couple of decades. Cyberpunk fiction was filled with cyborgs.
Cyberpunk, a subgenre of science fiction, appeared at just the right
time to influence the culture that emerged among early online adopters.
There's more interesting history around all this - e.g. William
Gibson's influential book _Neuromancer_ wasn't influenced by any
experience with actual computers, he hadn't touched one at that point.
His idea of "jacking into the matrix" where there's a visual perception
of data was inspired by electronic video games of the 80s.
  

    
Thanks for the etymology of 'cyborganic'. I also like the 'organic'
part of it, but did spend a few seconds musing on the idea of inorganic
evolution:)
  

    
Ed, this should get your juices flowing...from All Things Digital,
Twitter and Facebook Are Tomorrow's News Service -
http://allthingsd.com/20120318/twitter-and-facebook-are-tomorrows-news-service
-for-now-though/?mod=mailchimp

What a scary thought.
  

    
You ask about unsanctioned events during SXSW. People take advantage
of common presence in one place to schedule all sorts of things, from
meetings to unconferences to miniconferences that charge money. There
are also hundreds of parties, most of which are not "official." I think
the SXSW organization is not as concerned about the existence of these
events as they are whether the events are identified as, or presumed
to be, part of of SXSW. It's a branding issue. There was, for instance,
a health unconference a couple of years ago that was held in Austin
the day before SXSW started. They originally called it "South by Social
Health," but SXSW asked them to use a different name to avoid the
appearance that the event was sanctioned. The following year, the
organizers of the health unconference helped program a health track
within SXSW.

If you want to have an official SXSW party, they ask you to make it
free to badgeholders and charge others or ask for a donation. I.e. in
exchange for official status, you agree to make it a benefit for
badgeholders. Also if you have major sponsors for the party, they ask
that those sponsors make some kind of buy with SXSW, e.g. an ad in the
program book. In exchange you get listed in all the official materials.

I don't think they care about unofficial parties otherwise. Many
parties come together later than they should - I know of one this year
that became "official" too late to include it in the program book. You
really have to start party planning the summer before to be viable.