Signs of a media spring despite wintry atmosphere at SXSW

That's why Donath is an advocate of developing what she calls a "digital portrait," a way to catch and visualize all the info we're emitting. "Being able to see what kind of data and records and persona you're making through all the data that's persistent about you is not necessarily a bad thing. People like to see themselves in the mirror."

After Donath, privacy didn't look so dead after all. Austin was warming up too. By Monday, the gray was gone, and in the 80-degree heat, you could smell the meat cooking from across town. And for all the talk of dying industries among the conference's 10,000 attendees, the discussions seemed to move toward what remained alive -- or, better yet, what was more alive than ever.

In his talk about the state of the news media, author and new media analyst Steven Johnson focused on the possibilities of the present, rather than its troubles -- his operative metaphor was one of resilience and vitality.

"Today's media is in fact much closer to a real-world ecosystem in the way it circulates information than it is like the old industrial, top-down models of mass media," Johnson said.

Simply consider how the 2008 election was a world away from the pre-Web 1992 election -- when news choices for consumers were shockingly limited from today's perspective: You had your daily newspaper, a few TV news shows and whatever magazines you bought. It was a news desert rather than a rain forest.

Now, Johnson said, "there are more perspectives; there is more depth and more surface now. And that's the new growth. It's only started maturing."

Likewise, in the discussion that asked if PR agencies were dying, the panelists couldn't stop talking about how the world of public relations had been born again.

"Your job is 100% no longer to do your own PR," said Peter Shankman, chief executive of the New York-based PR firm Geek Factory Inc. "Your job is to get other people to do it for you."

Public relations and marketing, the panelists said, are benefiting tremendously from the networked world where people can see and hear the thoughts of millions -- it's one giant focus and all you have to do is listen.

"Get a little empathy going on," said Brian Solis, chief executive of FutureWorks PR in Silicon Valley. Putting an ear to the virtual ground will "tell you everything you need to know -- it's going to affect and influence what you write, how you talk. It's going to make you a little more passionate, a little more believable."

The PR panelists put that advice into action, live: While they were speaking to attendees over the microphones, they were also monitoring their laptops, reading and responding to the stream of messages coming to them from Twitter and often interrupting the verbal conversation to answer a tweet.

And it wasn't only this panel: The micro-messaging technology achieved near-ubiquity at South by Southwest. No panel I saw left it unmentioned (some couldn't stop mentioning it), and just about every other audience member seemed to be switching between tweeting and listening, listening and tweeting.

Sort of like the beginning of spring.

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david.sarno@latimes.com