While I wasn't overly impressed with SXSW Interactive as a whole, looking back, as I have been doing for the last few days, there's no question I've taken some important learnings away.
While the launch of new technologies, services and applications appear to be slowing I was struck by just now nascent and underdeveloped some of the products and themes of Web 2.0 are. Instead of wasting our precious time hungrily on the look out for the next meta-theory, the next revolution, we would do well to explore and develop further some of the important memes from the old new web.
Here are some of the things I'll be concentrating on over the next few months:
- From Jenkins, Johnston and McGonical I understood that users will become fuller participants in emerging media culture. This should change the way we think about interactions on sites. Users are becoming more sophisticated faster than we can change our existing sites and services to reflect this. At present, we offer nothing by the simplest form of interaction, participation and community.
- We're entering the era of participation and it's far more important than we [at the BBC] have given it credit for. Both at site level and at browser level we've yet to really provide our users with right tools for participating. This was backed up from talks by Jenkins and Anastasia Goodstein [YPulse]. According to the Pew Internet & American Life project,more than one-half of all teens have created media content,and roughly one-third of teens who use the Internet have shared content they produced. Young people have always been the most avid adopters of new technology an they are the next generation of Lonely Planet travellers and BBC TV and Radio Consumers.
- Where you have nascent participation you have nascent collective intelligence. Put simply how can we take advantage of the fact that nobody know everything but everything is known by the community. Today's media, which tends to be strongly authorial, does allow input from the crowd but doesn't help us combine and process all this information together. So for Lonely Planet, endeavouring to put all 400,000 + reviews on this site this year we should be thinking not how we regurgitate this information onto the web but how we process this knowledge into something more meaningful.
- The web is still incredibly silo'd but this is beginning to change and the change will gather pace. While I find it hard to believe that 'app fatigue' is caused solely from friction around multiple sign in I accept that user data locked into single services is seriously limiting the web's potential and the user experience.
- The endless arguments and conversations around single sign on reveal another more deeply disturbing trend. Despite the web being unequivicably mainstream in the western world there is still too much emphasis on what the technology can do rather than what the user wants. For example, much time at conferences like SXSW is given over to discussing the advantages and disadvantages of various authentication protocols and not enough thought to what the users actually want. The same task can be performed with a range of different technologies,and
the same technology can be deployed toward a variety of different ends. Some tasks may be
easier with some technologies than with others, and thus the introduction of a new technology
may inspire certain uses. Yet,these activities become widespread only if the culture also sup-
ports them,if they fill recurring needs at a particular historical juncture.It matters what tools
are available to a culture,but it matters more what that culture chooses to do with those tools.
- Rather than dealing with each technology in isolation,we would do better to take an ecological approach,thinking about the interrelationship among all of these different communication technologies,the cultural communities that grow up around them,and the activities they support.
- It is an inevitability that in the next couple of years we will see portable social networks as the building blocks already exist [e.g. OpenID, microformats and OAuth]. Echoing the point above this is going to lead to a level of complexity that we haven't thought about. Sure users will not have to re-introduce themselves to friends every time they use a new service but how will portable social networks deal with the complex web of relationships that make up a user's real social graph? For example, what if users that don't want all their friends to follow them from one service to another? They may wish, as some teens on the YPulse panel said, want to make a clean start on a new service. How is this possible if we're building an online meta-reputation were everything is intertwingled? How will the technology deal with what information I want to remain private. Just because information is private doesn't mean it's not portable - it's more a question of permissions. How will permissions based on services be structured? Things we haven't really begun to uncover or think through for the majority of our sites.
- Connected to the momentum behind portable social networks is the exciting / terrifying notion of distributed reputation. No question, reputation will help solve many of the internet's core ills. For example, if a known friend comments on your blog it should perhaps by-pass moderation. However, many of the advantages afforded by relative anonymity. For example, danah boyd, has argued that social networks like MySpace provides a fertile ground for identity development and cultural integration. As youth transition from childhood, they seek out public environments to make sense of culture, social status and how they fit into the world. Interacting with strangers helps them understand who they are and communities of interest allow them to explore ideas and values. With a distributed reputation system young peoples' social experimentation online, under the cloak of anonymity, could be replaced were the mistakes you make when you're younger haunt you for the rest of your life. Clearly, the need of temporal-reputation needs some work. Does the influence of certain events diminish over time and how?
- On the panel I chaired on stories, brands and games I really started to see that simply increasing the complexity of interactions of the depth of the interactive spectrum is only half the picture when it comes to deepening customer relations with your brand. As Jenkins explains in Convergence Culture, the emerging convergence paradigm assumes that media will interact in ever more complex ways. It is about finding through the interplay of modern media what they can't achieve through isolations. Sadly, there are precious few examples of where this is working well, which is sad because it's where traditional media and in particular public service media companies could have a real advantage over start-ups. Advertising executives struggling to reach a changing market, creative artists wanting new ways to tell stories and educators, trying to tap up informal learning communities should be leading the charge.
- Another panel focused on the relationship between video games and
traditional media. Increasingly media moguls see games not simply as a
means of stamping the franchise logo on some ancillary product but as a
means of expanding the storytelling experience. It still baffles me why the BBC has yet to use games effectively to broaden audiences experiences and explore ideas that couldn't fit in 30 minute show. Where is the Dr Who MMOG?
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