DCRC - Digital Cultures Research Centre

South by South West Interactive (SXSWi) is a Gargantuan techno culture festival where 19,000 people (this year) celebrate digital media. This year SXSWi, perhaps expectedly, focused on social media, gaming, making money and saving the world. I was there as part of an ACE delegation for Creative Producers. The Pervasive Media Knowledge Transfer Fellowship will be working with the delegates in our Summer School this June and this trip was the first leg of that process. Our aim (with iShed & Arts Council England) is to build a skills base for Pervasive Media amongst Creative Producers working with arts organisations across performance, cinema and gallery practices (See: http://www.ished.net/projects/sxsw/).

Having just landed my head is full of ideas and directions to pursue. Being at SXSW is like having a massive transfusion of connectivity. Everybody but everybody is relentlessly screen jabbing and hunting wireless signals and power sockets to juice up. In fact the first day for me was an exercise in spotting how many ways geeks can perform connectivity, 'The two thumbed walking tweet', 'the hunched round the power socket frowning seriously bearded boy', 'the operating iPad whilst crossing the street', not to mention the 'using PhotoBooth to put my on my make up in a 9.30 session.' I began to experience connection anxiety.

Throughout this jabfest I've been reading Sherry Turkle's new book 'Alone Together' - why wasn't she keynoting at SXSW? Turkle did crop up on Fox news, plugging the book in between meltdown bulletins.

'Alone Together' is an extended essay in digital anxiety. Turkle’s previous work has been very influential in its sympathetic accounts of the psychology of people and computers. The new book worries about our affective relationships with intelligent machines and the impact of social networking and every day communication technologies on the young. She has conducted a series of interviews and focus groups with teenagers in the U.S. At SXSW they would be called 'Generatiion Z' by the marketeers or the ‘millenials’ by Bruce Sterling. Turkle writes about the pressures and the costs of social media to the young, pressures to constantly relate, respond, perform, be visible in newly time consuming ways. Her real concern though is the cost of these activities as other things not done, talking face or face or even on the phone where many of them prefer the dangerous control of SMS & IM exchanges.

This 'Generation Z' are pressured to maintain highly engineered profiles that can express only the narrowest bandwidth at a time when they need to be experimenting with their identities. Their baby boomer parents are also attending to their own screen communications the whole time so even those limited opportunities for face to face interaction that all parents know have to seized get sacrificed to screenjabbing. Its all a bit grim and I’m not entirely convinced by the argument this time round; BUT it bears some thinking about and I wish that conversation had been happening in Austin Convention Center.

It might have balanced the force of confrontation with the turbo charged techno capitalism of SXSW. (Though this could just be me...) So much belief untroubled by the energy of contradiction or reflexivity was certainly challenging for a bunch of European (and Australian) artists/producers from the public culture sector.

I was trying to follow up ideas for the Connected Communities research that we are kicking off here at the moment. But every time I found myself in a session where community was discussed it meant purely a marketing term. Any of the debates from 1990s (see eg Steve Jones’ work or the CMC Journal) appeared to have passed Austin by. Here community is just a way of building a market. So a session on ‘UGC and Monetization’ turned out to be a conversation with one of the producers of ‘Lockerz’, a site that rewards Generation Zers for posting or liking or commenting or participating in any way, with points. And points mean … discounts for online shopping in the Lockerz stores. It’s a kind of perfect teen shopping machine whose customers are its ‘community’.

Still, for every one of those there was a JibJab, those wonderful dudes who brought you Elf Yourself. For only a dollar a month you can get access to a range of brilliant D.I.Y collage animations that you put your own face on. They have 273m faces uploaded. Good clean (and money spinning) fun.

I really enjoyed most of the sessions I was in but not always for the ostensible reasons! Given that one of my Fellowship research themes is value in pervasive media it's all useful whether I feel creatively at home with it or not. In thinking about value I've also been trying to think about values, and what the relationship between economic and other values are. The PMStudio/DCRC network has been deploying some ideas derived from thinking ecologically to understand value. One outcome of this is an understanding that culture needs heterogeneous value systems overlapping to work.None of us make art/culture just for money. It has all kinds of other values for us. Play. Expression. Communication. Community. Belonging. Pleasure. And if they aren 't there the economic value won't be there either. Monoculture is the thing to avoid. Good in the short term but messes up the garden in the end. BUT all of us have to turn the value constellation that we inhabit into a value proposition that will convince our investors and partners (no longer 'funders'). Theres no 'outside' where there is a resource free practice.

So what can we learn about our worlds from the presentations at SXSW? Obviously there's a ton of inspirational stuff about the power and joy of collective intelligence. But often as pure exploitation in the service of selling more stuff that people didn't really need in the first place whilst we all do more and more immaterial labour for the attention economy. The challenge as ever is to harness all this collective intelligence power in our creative and innovation practices.

There’s a definite sense that we could be inspired by the focus and drive of many of the projects at SXSW.So that we could be as inspiring about the business of culture as that community is about the business of business.