South by Southwest Interactive. Austin, Texas. For over ten years now the creators and users of technology’s cutting edge have gathered in the town of great Tex-Mex and live music to, well, interact, after a fashion. This is truly the realm of the ADD generation. Everywhere you looked at the convention center, at the panels, in the halls, even in the bathrooms, people were engaged in some form of electronic communion with their laptop/pda/cellphone, often all at the same time. This seemed to be another year where social networking was the dominant theme of the show, with applications like Twitter (think micro-blogging meets MySpace) taking over the attention of many of the attendees. Twitter, whose slogan is “What Are You Doing?” is a cellphone-based technology that allows users to text personal information about where they are, where they’re going, etc. to each other, and also check in via the web.
For all the attention to the future of media at SXSW, there was definitely a lack of ‘old-media’ publishers and companies in attendance. Aside from the Knopf Group and Penguin UK, there was very little evidence that this conference is on the radar of the big New York houses. Bad news for them, as many of the attendees and companies represented are actively planning their downfall. In the brave new world of blogs and bloggers, social networking, self-publishing and user-generated content, commercial publishers ignore this at their own peril. For example, at a sparsely attended panel called ‘The Future of the Book,’ the speakers were all from online-based publishers, companies like Blurb and Lulu, and digital book proponent Brewster Kahle, who brought a prototype of the near-mythical ‘$100 laptop.’
As Jeremy Ettinghausen, Digital Publisher at Penguin UK, noted in the Penguin blog, (http://thepenguinblog. typepad.com) “old-media companies (like Penguin) are having to change their ways and move with the times,encourage participation, look at how people want to use the books we publish and how they want to share them and talk about them. It’s not always going to be a smooth transition, and we might stumble on the way, but as four days in Austin have shown me, there are a lot of great storytellers out there and plenty of people who want to hear those stories and, importantly, some great ways of connecting the two groups.” Hopefully this message will make it to those who most need to hear it.
PT would like to thank Jason Kincade, Manager of New Media at Knopf and Pantheon for contributing this piece.
Old Media Schools Hipster Daddybloggers, Gamers
Almost all of the panelists presenting at SXSW interactive were well versed in all things digital, natch. Even those that dabble in print are better known for their digital escapades. Neal Pollack, for example, author of Alternadad, is famous for his hipster daddyblogging, and Austin Grossman author of Soon I Will Be Invincible (Pantheon June ’07) is a game design consultant. So when two old-media-ites, Will Schwalbe and David Shipley, presented a panel on e-mail faux-pas and correct use to promote their new book Send: The Essential Guide to Email for Home & Office some in the audience were apprehensive. “I was worried that we were at a conference with next generation technology people,” Jason Kincade, Manager of New Media at Knopf & Pantheon said. “I thought, they’re jaded, e-mail is so passé, they’e probably using some other thing with some acronym we’ve never even heard of. Why will they care about this book?” As it turned out, the duo managed to tailor their advice to the crowd, and by the end of the panel, the techno-young’uns were clamoring for more. Starting with the interactive component on their website (www.thinkbeforeyousend.com) where they ask readers to share their most horrifying email mishaps, Shipley & Schwalbe engaged in an extended discussion with attendees about their own stories and proferred advice. “You can’t get much more old media than the Times & Disney,” Kincade said. “And yet here were these kids writing code and applications for cell phones, all wanting to talk to these two ‘old’ guys.”
