Back from the Land of Continuous Partial Attention
South by Southwest Interactive was overloaded with content and people, and I don’t have anything cogent to say about the whole of it.
The two most thought-provoking presentations happened at the beginning and end of the conference. Henry Jenkins and Steven Johnson opened with a conversation about participation and collective intelligence, tropes I frequently return to. Jenkins posted a recap of the discussion on his blog, so I won’t repeat him here.
A throwaway line in the Jenkins/Johnson presentation about the transition from “democracy as an event” to “democracy as a lifestyle” resonated with me the next day, sitting in a panel called “Friend Me! Vote for Me! Donate Now!” Someone from the audience noted that “Represent Me!” was missing from title phrasing. Sadly, the panel didn’t want to discuss life after the campaign.
Jane McGonigal closed the conference with a talk about happiness. She defined happiness as:
- Satisfying work to do.
- The experience of being good at something.
- Time spent with people we like.
- The chance to be a part of something bigger.
McGonigal proposed that we as a society have done our best happiness work through game design, and that instead of trying to make games ever more engrossing, we ought to make the world more like the best games. Mcgonigal is an Alternate Reality Game pioneer. Her World Without Oil won the Web Award for activism. And she announced the recent launch of The Lost Ring, an ARG with a tie-in to the Olympics.
McGonigal identified ten ARG super-skills:
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- Mobbability
- Collaborate and coordinate at large scales
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- Cooperation Radar
- Instinctively recognize most relevant collaborator per situation.
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- Ping Quotient
- Reach and be reached in a group.
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- Influency
- Adapt persuasive strategies to environment.
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- Multi-Capitalism
- Fluency in working with different capitals, e.g., natural, intellectual, social, and financial.
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- Protovation
- Fearless innovation in rapid, iterative cycles.
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- Open Authorship
- Create content for public consumption and modification.
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- Signal/Noise Management
- Filter meaningful information from shared data streams.
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- Longbroading
- Think in terms of ever larger systems.
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- Emergensight
- Anticipate and cope with surprising results and complexity.
McGonigal put up slides from her presentation, and Dan Hon has posted what appears to be a complete transcript of the talk.
I love the idea of using quality of life as a direct metric rather than an implied side effect!
All of the keynote presentations featured live “graphical recording” by Sunni Brown. Check out her visuals for Jenkins/Johnson and McGonigal!
Other thoughts…. outside.in, Steven Johnson’s hyperlocal community project, looks interesting. As does the “make the atom more like data” hardware from Bug Labs.
Update: Videos are now posted for the Jenkins/Johnson opening remarks and the McGonigal keynote (part 1, part 2). Film of all sorts of other good stuff from SXSW can be found at http://2008.sxsw.com/coverage/
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