TLF @ SXSW Interactive Days 3 and 4: There’s no one solution

Day 3 was a mixture of practical workshops and  topical discussion. I spent the morning at  a panel on user experience design: the “soft” red headed stepchild of web design  that’s secretly its backbone.  Of all of the panels I’ve attended here, Leah Buley’ s insight on how to work as a UX team of one will stick with me and hopefully guide what I do for years to come. I want to do more UX design!

I was not too impressed with a panel on online communities, and headed to the Can Social Media End Racism? panel. Of course it can’t, but considering how homogenous the SXSW crowd is for the most part, to be able to have the discussion in an environment like this was really important. For me, I still see so much opportunity to use online communications to really mobilize people to connect with each other and do outstanding things in real life, and panels like that one remind me that there’s a lot of untapped potential,  I want to be a part of it all.

The Web In Higher Education panel was PACKED. I was shocked at how well higher ed was represented here., in this standing room only crowd. It was, as co-presented Dylan Wilbanks noted, a “dour looking crowd.” Lots of frustration, staff vs. administration vs. faculty, it’s complicated and frought with politics, and lots of people seemed to need to get stuff off of their chest.

Wilbanks said that “higher ed web combines the worst part of startups with the worst parts of large corporations: limited resources + tons of bureaucracy.” Putting it that way, it made me want to throw myself out of a window.

He also noted that women in technology tend to be underrepresented in every industry -EXCEPT higher education. So is higher ed the pink ghetto of technology? Is it one of the few places where a female may be able to advance their careers? We didn’t actually have that discussion in the panel, but it’s worth thinking about. Ultimately, though, I met a lot of wildly creative people at the higher ed web panel and meetup later that day. Together there’s a metric ton of great ideas and potential innovation. Dour though the crowd seemed, no one was lacking in passion when talking about their jobs. That gives me hope.

I pretty much covered a lot of Day 4 in my post yesterday. The one panel that stood out was Engagement 1.0: Understanding the History of Fan Interactivity featuring one of my academic heroes, Henry Jenkins.Nothing new was said if you’ve ever read any of Jenkins’ work, particularly Textual Poachers, his groundbreaking look at fan culture, but as with the racism panel, I think it opened up the dialogue to some folks who may not be aware of this subculture. And since so much of online media these days about niche rather than broad audiences, it’s important, I think, to understand the role that fan culture has played in really shaping the “social web” we see today. There were a few marketers in the audience who essentially asked how/if any of this information can be leveraged on a marketing level. basically everyone on the panel said the same thing. “yes, if you actually listen to your fans rather than telling them what you think they should hear.”

Jenkins used Star Trek as an example of a media company that destroyed it own fanbase by trying to police fan activity (trying to shut down fan run clubs and fan made movies) while at the same time trying to force new Star Trek spinoffs down fans throats. The lesson: fans know what they value from the experience, so listen to them and learn from it.

I’ve got one more day here, ending (for me) with a talk by another one of my gurus, Chris “The Long Tail” Anderson of Wired. I am winding down from the SXSW Interactive experience, excited and frustrated about the future, but ultimately still psyched by its possibility. I feel like we are all learning from each other here, as we all fumble in the dark toward whatever future online media brings our way. But the fun is in the process,  I think, and as long as that is the case, SXSWi will continue to blow minds each year.

One more day to go!