I spoke yesterday at the TerraFuture conference. It was fascinating for a few reasons.
Firstly I’ve never presented a Pecha Kucha or an Ignite talk so it was interesting to try and present in such a structured way. Was relieved the talk went well although it did feel quite quiet… sadly no questions at the end so there was no feedback loop. Also because of the short burst of presentation then nothing back from the audience I was reminded of proabably my favourite bit of writing by Douglas Adams about the interactivity and mass media (How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet). In this case the silent audience had a strong and powerful effect on me; the disconnection that I was talking about social networks fixing. I also got more comments and some questions via Twitter and by email than I had people talking to me afterwards. It made me start to feel that I was living more online than offline, but I think it was more to do with the format of the conference.
Social Networks for Grand Challenges
It was also really interesting that there was almost no Twitter backchannel. I’m so used to being at conferences or events and having a rich discussion while the talks are going on. It almost felt isolating and dislocating in certain ways. I found out during and after that there were four of us there twittering although to paraphrase, the immortal Morecambe and Wise just not at the same time or in necessarily the right order (ecoescape, menka and StevenFeldman). I felt a bit more connected as some of my friends were out there chatting back as I was hashtagging at the request of Nico MacDonald.
Finally I was really interested to see Lord Puttnam’s talk. The talk was great, thought provoking and painting a quite apocalyptic and dystopian future. This future, where man’s greed during the 20th century where mass consumption caused partly by mass media causing a spiral of fiscal and ecological and environmental debt, is not a remotely pretty one and I hope we can turn the tide quickly before it is as bad as Lord Puttnam predicts. I hope we don’t get to his tipping point where the whole of the Philippines is rendered uninhabitable.
His other rather scary prediction came from the absence of knowledge within government of social platforms and networks and the power that a mobilised and socialised democracy can provide. My first personal thought about the Obama regime was joy, my second was fear that if they fell foul of the power of the lobbyists they would have a torrid time. For the first time in living memory a political leader was elected with their campaign paid for by the people, with a touch phrase of Yes We Can and a constant engagement with the electorate to ask what they thought. If they didn’t follow through in office and did just what they were lobbied and bribed into doing they’d face a backlash of discontented voters of the like we’ve not seen before.
Lord Puttnam’s scary prediction came from the notion that in a more social more digital world people are more easily swayed or influenced to right or left, either by peers or by media. That it is easier to be binary, to see either black or white rather than a bluer or redder shade of grey. I can see where he’s coming from, but I hope he’s wrong. It would be a shame to try and stifle any new democratic movements emerging simply because you were afraid that the extremists would be better at mobilising people than the centrists. There’s a big way to fix this too… get the government and civil service more involved in this sort of media. Find a way of more of them understanding that no one really believes their “on message” PR anymore and just get them to do a better job of communicating in this new way of putting out your message to people, listening to what they respond and want and then moving the conversation which the electorate want forward. If LabourSpace is really the best they can do, actually I may be with Lord Puttnam.
