Just because we can, does it mean we should? This was a philosophical question raised at the X/Media/Lab conference last week at the Sydney Opera House.
Just because you can record your sexual prowess on a website – the number of times you get it up, the times of the day or night when you’re at your sexual peak etc – should you?
Writer/journalist Anand Giridharadas tickled everyone's fancy with a little afternoon delight - there's a website called bedposted.com .
This became the running joke for every speaker who followed.
The ABC was there, The Edge from the State Library of Queensland was there, a party from QUT’s Creative Industries was there too.
X/Media/Lab has become a major event for anyone interested in digital media.
The stellar line-up at last week’s event at the Sydney Opera House included Robert Tercek, a renaissance man of the entertainment industry; Ralph Simon, founder of the modern mobile entertainment industry (inventor of the ringtone); Fanshake founder Dana Al Salem, who built the Yahoo! Europe team when she was 18 or so years old; and Amin Zoufonoun, Google’s director of corporate development.
Most of them, like China’s Haidong Pan who built a Chinese Wikipedia, stuck to the theme of how do you build an innovative global Media idea into reality.
Google's Amin Zoufonoun quoted World Bank figures to prove his point that the digital economy should indeed warrant closer inspection by investors and governments: for every 10 percent increase in broadband speed there's a corresponding 1.3 percent economic growth. NOTE: no private investors were present at the conference. Well, there was one angel from New Zealand but he didn't raise his hand.
The overall message delivered by most speakers was that digital is a new ballgame but it’s the same game. Digital businesses need to solve a real-world problem, or tell a compelling story, and do what they do well to be successful.
Ralph Simon, who flew in from South Africa where he worked on the World Cup, identified the key common ingredients of great innovations: originality; a network of believers who spread word by mouth; adequate seed funding; international connections and a cast-iron belief & persistence. These ingredients apply across the board – not just to digital innovation.
Dana Al Salem identified two tribes. She supported her argument that the more things change the more they really stay the same by comparing today’s GenY and the hippies of 40 years ago.
Hippies championed free love and so does GenY who are known as the Hook-Up Generation. Hurricane Katrina now//Hurricane Camille then. Glastonbury now // Woodstock then. Virgin Galactic space travel now // Copncorde’s first supersonic flight then. Vietnam War // Iraq War … BP spill // California spill in ‘69. The big difference between the Baby Boomers and GenY? GenY’s overstimulated so they’re difficult to excite, they love change, they are a tagged species. Hippy freedom didn’t include an acceptance of loss of privacy and a love of exclusivity.
While most speakers talked about how to make money one speaker spoke about the need to create a philosophy to govern digital ethics and life. Anand Giridharadas, the tech columnist for the International Herald Tribune, has been writing a book living in a small, isolated Indian village. And he too came to the realization that the digital era has not really changed the workings of social networking. The technology’s changed, the platform has changed but it’s still a village where everyone can hear everything that goes down through paper (or grass) walls.
He calls it ambient sociability. He says it’s something old wrapped in something new. Giridharadas says the internet is not a rootless, new phenomenon without precedent, it’s all the bickering, praising, coming and going that makes up life in a traditional village. But he suggests that there are more challenging areas than marketing and economics that the digitally enabled society has to solve. There’s a question of civility, universality and transparency. Issues such as how much anonymity is too much? Should people be held accountable for their online actions with the introduction of a persistent digital identity?
What happens to honesty and personal integrity when people, being conscious of the image they project online, start to edit themselves to make their personal brand more palatable? Does that kind of self marketing turn people into liars?
He ended on this note:
“We need to figure out the shape of the life we wish to lead and ask how all these magnificent, dangerous ones and zeroes can be put to the task.”
“How do we evolve a digital philosophy? What would it look like?” Just because we can, does it mean we should?