Opinion: SXSW offers some valuable lessons and rousing success stories, but don't let self-interested boosterism replace critical thinking.
It's day four of the SXSW conference in Austin, Texas, and so far we've seen a lot of great panels on tagging, startup business ideas, blogging, mobile applications, and blog micro formats, just to name a few.
We've also heard Jason Fried and Jim Coudal give their standard talk on design entrepreneurship and keeping things small, and doing more with less.
On March 12, pro-bloggers Jason Kottke and Heather Armstrong took the stage to discuss how they approached building their respective blogs into businesses. And on March 13, Craigslist founder Craig Newmark and Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales had a great discussion about the future of citizen journalism. These are just broad strokes— there are a lot of interesting panels, and a lot of smart people whose work should be acknowledged.
But what I'd like to chat with you about today isn't how excited I am to be sharing the hippest city in the world with a gaggle of garrulous geeks with an idiosyncratic affinity for cell phone holsters and Hawaiian shirts. What I'd like to chat about is how this year's festival seems like a year in transition. In a few years, when we all look back at SXSW 2006, I'm willing to bet we'll say "that was the year we were a bit lost, even though we didn't know it."
Because despite the brouhaha over the second coming of the Internet, despite the recognition in mainstream outlets like the San Francisco Chronicle and the New York Times, and the breathless posting on blog after blog about the resurgence of entrepreneurship and grassroots community involvement, I get the feeling that everybody at SXSW is really just shooting from the hip.
Now, I hope it's not misplaced criticism to urge a return to seriousness during a conference renowned for its geeky bacchanalia and keg-fueled brannigans. And certainly there are many, many parts of SXSW that I was proud to bear witness to: Mark Boulton and Jason Santa Maria talked about design; James Surowiecki talked about the wisdom of crowds; Thomas Vander Wal and company discussed tagging; Craig Newmark spoke about the trustworthiness of journalism.
But over the course of South by Southwest several people—designers, developers, and business owners and managers—have remarked to me (or within earshot of me) that many of the panels seemed glib and unorganized. I've also heard complaints that the level of discourse sometimes amounted to little more than "this is cool, that would be sweet."
Everyone here is talented, and everyone here is working hard toward the future, but nobody seems to have a clear vision of what that future is.
Of course, in a conference that covers so many disciplines, it's difficult to settle on a single definition of the future. What is SXSW about? Is it citizen media, the power of many? Or is it the power of the few and design entrepreneurship? Is it developing for the mobile Web, or understanding AJAX? Is it the business of blogging? Is it all these things?
The answer is probably yes, it is all these things. But my inability to find a theme in SXSW leads me to think maybe nobody really knows what that theme is. Maybe it doesn't need a theme. Or, maybe it's like a CEO said to me today, "I think it's just too easy to get a panel at this thing."
At the end of the day, however, despite my dire prognostications, this conference is about the freedom to innovate and experiment. We're all carefully making our way toward the future, one innovation at a time. Like William Gibson said, the future is here, it's just unevenly distributed.
All I really worry about is that we're not taking the time to explore the ramifications of what we're creating. Do we need more blogs? More tag clouds? More microformats? Is a mashup good simply because it is a mashup, or does it identify a point of pain and innovate around it? Should we be relying on adwords as the Internet's financial crutch, or should we be creating value in another way? Who will help us keep up with all the social networks, the tagging systems? When everyone's favorite cheerleader Dave Winer says he's going to stop blogging, shouldn't we stop and ask why?
I think we need more people like Rashmi Sinha, James Surowiecki and Clay Shirky to study this brave new world we're creating. Of course, that takes time.
But meanwhile, let's try not to get lost in our own echo chamber, our little online bathysphere of hum and chuff, in which critical thinking is replaced by boosterism and we cheer ourselves into complacency.
We're all learning here, and few people, least of all me, are experts. Let's not forget that.
