AUSTIN, TEXAS — Visitors to Austin's South by Southwest conference arrived Friday to a sky like a wet blanket. A cold, wet blanket. We traipsed our way from panel to panel, grumbling from beneath convenience-store umbrellas, wondering about the possibilities for eating barbecue in a rainstorm.
In the same kind of way, discussion at the new media portion of this year's conference was shot through with a chilly strain of winter. At least five panel titles mused grimly about which parts of the old culture are headed for the graveyard. "Is Privacy Dead?" one asked. "Are PR agencies a dying breed?" worried another, and while we're at it, "Is Web 2.0 Killing the Sports Business?" Others didn't even bother with question marks, declaring the death of friendship, personal blogging and print media.
It's true that giving your proposed panel an extreme name is a surefire way to grab attention and thereby boost your chances of winning a spot on the crowded schedule. Except I took a look back at last year's listings, and there wasn't a deathwatch in sight.
No, this year a woeful economic climate has compounded the problems of a slow-footed industry that's watching the Internet turn its revenue streams into quicksand. With the fear and paranoia that comes with that, it's no wonder people are seeing ghosts.
Privacy has been one of the Web's biggest hysteria magnets for years, and the analysts on Saturday's panel tapped that fear and turned it into a packed auditorium.
Judith Donath, a professor at MIT's Media Lab, was on that panel, and afterward explained what's dying and what's coming alive. "The biggest piece that's in danger is the ephemerality of everyday life," Donath said. "It wasn't that long ago that almost nothing was recorded. A few people might've written about something, and a few things got painted, but most of the rest was gone."
But now we're capturing that past with startling fidelity -- at the same time as we're volunteering more information about our lives to Flickr, YouTube and Facebook, commercial interests are hoarding mountains of consumer information that's completely invisible to us, even though it's ours.
Insert boogeyman here. The less control we have of our own information, the more likely it can be used against us by an unfriendly government or a good divorce lawyer.
