Reflections on a Web 2.0 Conference – Part One: Overall Impressions
I have many many things to try and flush out through this post. It may zig zag a bit, and may use too many words, but I’ll try to focus my next few blogs around a few different themes I picked out from the jam-packed 2-Day conference. This blog will be more about the conference itself than any of the content presented. Some excellent presentations to be ruminated on later.
So if you haven’t guessed by now, for me the conference was an excellent, positive, evoking experience. What made it so, as with any type of social knowledge-sharing event, were those who conjure it into being. I truly enjoyed my interaction with everyone there, and sought to interact with as many people as I could, with one exception… but I’ll get to why I steered clear of K33n later.
It was a short conference which would have perhaps been better staged over a three-day period than a two-day one. The parellel sessions means that I missed far more sessions than I got to attend. There will, however be video podcasts available of most (if not all) the presentations and keynotes in about a months time. I will try to assemble a page to act as a central link to all of the presentations and people behind the presentations if the Conference wiki does not assume that role in the coming weeks. One of the things that was discussed in terms of the internal linkages and networking that was occuring out of the conference, was that those of us who have embedded ourselves into these mechanisms would do well to use this as a springboard for collaboration and collectivity. As George Ritzer said, “prosumers of the world unite!”
George Ritzer was certainly a highlight for me. He was the essential critical voice that was needed for the room full of “techno-apostles” as ourselves. It is unfortunate that it was not his debate that set the tone for the critical opposition, rather than the smarmy Mr. K33n, whose name I am not even going to give credential to. I cannot, however, resist commenting on Mr. K33n’s Keynote Address.
Basically and paradoxically, Mr. K33n both proved his point and discredited his thesis about how the Internet is undermining culture by speaking as an amatuer on socio-cultural phenomenon in front of a room of socio-cultural experts and being discredited as such by his audience. No one really took his criticisms seriously, not even Ritzer, the most oppositional critic in the room. Though one thing that becames clear in Mr. K33n’s “performance” at the conference, he is a character… and “plays one” in his expressions on the topic of Web 2.0. I think a few people were expecting me to confront Mr. K33n, I was worked up about him being there for months. And it was truly difficult to listen to someone not 10 feet away from you spout out these commerically-driven attacks on media and culture democratization, far more so than to read it… But in the end, I was certain that I would be confronted by the character and refused to try and engage in an intellectual conversation with him. And that is all I’m going to say about that…
One thought pattern that emerged from this only after the conference was over, emerged out of some of Dr. Ritzer’s criticisms. Basically, Dr. Ritzer (author of the sociological text “The MacDonaldization of Society”) raised debate about the exploitative nature of Web 2.0 technologies, where the line between producer and consumer of user-generated content is blurred but the benefits of the culture is clear, in the corporate world. While Dr. Ritzer was perhaps over-generalizing about ALL of Web 2.0 culture without actually having participated in the deep culture itself, he did get me to thinking about potential research issues surrounding the very “user-generated content” presented at the conference itself.
With presentations about YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, Second Life, and del.icio.us… one might have got the impression that this brand of sociology is being funded by such ®’s in the Web world. Perhaps we might want to take a few moments to consider all of the potential market research exchanged over those stimulating few days.
In any case, it was truly a pleasurable few days… very legitimating, very thought-provoking, and who’d of thought an academic conference could be so much fun!
If you attended the conference and would like me to link to your paper, blog or web-presense, do not hesitate to email me or add me on Facebook, Flickr or del.icio.us. And here you can read my paper Which Web 2.0? It was suggested that a common tag be used for photos and web references to the conference, I’m just using “York 2.0“.
