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Strong messages amid uncertainty

Thursday, March 19, 2009

DATELINE: Austin, Texas – An uncertain and confused geekfest – such has been the widespread assessment of this year’s Interactive part of the annual South by South West festival (Film and Music are of course the event's other, longer-established divisions, which only the really unkind and foolish would label “Old Media”).

This is my fourth SxSW, and the 15th year that the so-called New Media have had their own extravaganza specifically devoted to them. I must report this time that the event's exponential growth has now shot well past the level of critical mass ... to enter the realm of unrelieved chaos.

 

More than the conference-plus-festival’s own mushrooming size may lie behind this. The depressed economic backdrop overall has induced much unconfident dither, prompting session names ranging from the vapid Start-Ups and The Recession through the anxious How Not To Fail to the delusionally optimistic How to Fund a Start-Up.  A lost generation of webbies seems encapsulated here.

 

But what has contributed most concretely to the rudderless zeitgeist is the poor moderating of so many sessions. It’s a truism that good moderating is a skill, and a fairly rare one at that - and it’s been conspicuous here by its absence. It has handicapped many promising sessions, even those with highly qualified and (sometimes, anyway) remarkably articulate panelists.

 

Gratifyingly, an exception was danah boyd (above left) the now famously lower-cased anthropologist of cyberspace (proclaimed “the high priestess” of online social networking by the Financial  Times – a moniker I won’t let her forget) whose panel session sharply tackled the question - well-phrased and echoing SxSW’s own dazed state - Is Privacy Dead, or Merely Confused?

 

Boyd drew out from Siva Vaidhyanathan of the University of Virginia a spirited rejoinder to the shibboleth expressed again and again by Google - that internet-users are happy to give up some personal privacy in return for helpful online functionality. In his day-job Vaidhyanathan teaches a class labeled in laudably clear terms “Practicing Surveillance”, and so unsurprisingly he subjected search engines and other web businesses that that vacuum personal information out of us to a blunt and prolonged tongue-lashing, best shortened to: “Privacy is not some commodity that we trade.”

 

In the face of the current “Googlization of everything” (a climate-description which panel and audience both hailed as apt, and which Vaidhyanathan is using to entitle a forthcoming book) it does seem possible that, perforce, we will all intuitively develop a sense of our “data-self”. That was a notion lobbed by panelist Judith Donath of the MIT Media Lab. Rather as we already have a sense of our physical self or our economic self, we could - to varying degrees of skillfulness - learn to conduct ourselves carefully online. After all, don't we present different degrees of information about ourselves in the physical world, as in - for instance - almost automatically removing a name-tag when we leave a conference seminar and step into the public street?

 

But as Donath was quick to acknowledge, the online data-trail we leave behind is not always obvious to ourselves – though of course it’s always very clear to Google and all those other information-gatherers like ChoicePoint - which sells its net-user details (blithely described as “actionable intelligence” by this unit of the Reed Elsevier publishing conglomerate) to corporations and government agencies.

 

The troubling question remains ... where will the burden of responsibility reside for the maintenance of personal privacy? With the individual, and his or her own ability to navigate this tricky territory - or with the powerful web entities who control what used to be called, in a touchingly limited underestimate, the “information superhighway”?

   

  

 

** EVERY WEEK CONNECTICUT'S NPR STATION, WHDD (ROBIN HOOD RADIO) AIRS A DISCUSSION BASED ON THIS COLUMN - Fridays at 7.35 am, and Saturdays at 4.45 pm.**

 

Listen to THE MEDIA BEAT podcasts by clicking HERE.

   

 

AS EVER, THE SxSW FILM FESTIVAL is peppered with spicy offerings. None is more piquant – and yet appealingly sweet – than Saint Misbehavin’, a documentary assembled lovingly by first-time film-maker Michelle Esrick that profiles Wavy Gravy - an icon of hippiedom who is more, much more than that.

 

In fact the film revels in the breadth of Hugh Romney’s world-improving activities - for yes, that’s his pedestrian given-name, I’m somewhat sad to relate, and yes his altruism is as matter-of-factly broad and simple as that. Improving the world is what he’s been up to ever since he first catapulted to national fame as the voice of the Woodstock music festival forty years ago this summer.

 

He emerges from this account, whether he’s in whiteface or not, and whether he’s raising funds for the Seva Foundation’s eye-surgeries in Afghanistan or teaching young wannabe circus performers in summer camp, as quintessentially a “holy fool”. It must be said, though, that apart from in that nicely guffawing title, the only time Wavy is actually called a saint in the movie is when the alternative guru Ram Dass, a.k.a. Dr Richard Alpert pays tribute to him.

 

Esrick (pictured above center, as sidekick to Mr W.G.) has pulled off an extraordinary feat – not least in finding such telling archive footage (much of it disinterred from a long-forgotten self-storage unit) and magically weaving out of it an evocative tale of the times. It traces this one-time Greenwich Village folk-singer-poet, a peer of Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and the others ... on through his trekking with camp-followers across Europe and Asia (did YOU know this? - I didn’t) doing charitable work in the Indian subcontinent ... to his present-day life - at nearly 73 years old - of lightly-stated but dedicated service to humanity. Oh, and along the way Ben and Jerry’s named an ice-cream flavor for him – how’s that for immortality?

 

The whole of Saint Misbehavin’ is suffused with a delectable wryness. In just in the same way that Wavy himself - being the genuine clown he is - takes his purpose seriously, but not himself.

  

  

 

HUMOR THAT'S MUCH MORE SELF-CONSCIOUS - or more accurately, some urbane satire of complete self-absorption - traveled with me from New York to Texas … where I felt high style seemed best expressed in some dramatic upholstery, employing both cowhide AND snakeskin stitched together on a massive ottoman in an Austin atrium.

 

In case I should get homesick for cosmopolitan condescension, my luggage contained the new book from Jean-Phillippe Delhomme, the clever illustrator who’s considered France’s answer to The New Yorker’s cartoonists. It’s called, with a straight face, The Cultivated Life: Artistic, Literary and Decorating Dramas (published by Rizzoli) and is the first compilation of Delhomme’s work in English.

 

Best for me, out of all the witty yoking of captions with exquisite watercolored drawings, is his skewering of decorating pretensiousness. Some plates are briskly deft in picturing blindness among the visually fastidious.

 

The caption to one scene showing a couple in their new library (above right) reads: “For all we know, there could be some Derrida or even Proust in these shelves; our decorator selected everything for the neutral tone of the book-covers”.

 

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