experience matters

Adam Bracegirdle | Critical Mass Calgary

This year marked my second at the SXSW interactive festival and it’s escalation was palpable. As one firmly rooted in the cerebral, esoteric environs of the creative department, I was expected by many to attend those “creative” sessions in which my peers debate, among other things, the value of the word press theme, or typography on the web. Although important work, I found conversations on the future of my medium to be a far more tantalizing proposition this time around. With that in mind I siphoned a rather crowded schedule down to a multitude of unfamiliar topics ranging from scaled multi-touch platforms to the economics of high quality content creation online. Much to my delight I found something compelling in nearly every one short of a distant few (some were vain attempts at self marketing rather then an argument of any substance. I haven’t the appetite for that.). After a short while, in fact from the very first of my lectures, I began to notice a pervading thought in nearly every talk I attended.

Convergence seemed to be on the minds of every eminent social guru and internet famous CEO at the conference. Wary as I am of the dreaded interactive meme, I could not help but feel that convergence wasn’t just another passing interweb buzzword. It seemed to permeate every lecture regardless of bent. Hardware discussions would invariably turn to talk of real-time repositories that could be accessed from anywhere; hardware as we know it becoming usurped by its more powerful, cloud-based counterpart. And although I suppose one could say that it’s an obvious (and dated) example of where convergence is headed, the example becomes substantive when watching a mob of displeased technophiles assault Mark Cuban, chairman of HDNet, demanding access to a`la carte content at a whim, from anywhere.

Talk of convergence extended well out of the traditional confines of platform and hardware though. Point in case, “social” was a virtual non-event this year as it has become almost totally ubiquitous; no longer considered a back channel for passive content. The emergence of the front channel was happening before us at SXSW as Twitter blew up during the keynotes with a frenzy of discussion, valuable or not, and location based services like Gowalla begin to provide tangible value in finding anything from Migas for breakfast to the best dive bar in Texas. I found myself at one point wondering if I was the only one in my lecture becoming confused by the direction of the conversation, only to find that several others were tweeting from within the room and getting informed responses from the moderator, in real-time. The convergence of channels is happening rapidly in these circles as the term “multi-channel” exits the lexicon and is replaced simply by “interaction”.

The advertising and publication industries felt the effects of convergence too as Wired showed us a vision of the near future with the startling convergence of print and digital advertising on the iPad, which felt foreign yet oddly self-evident. You could almost feel the old paradigms of print and broadcast fall to the way side. The demo also served as a discernible reminder of the further atomization of commerce as it transcends destination and begins infiltrating every corner of our lives, integrating into location and dialogue in ways that could leave one searching for some solid unmarked ground. One can imagine instantly buying a book mentioned in an article by simply gesturing over it’s title; commerce becoming completely effortless and omnipresent.

Many of the ideas presented this year were so grandiose as to be almost pulverizing in scope, not even mentioning some of the stuff Microsoft has been working on in the areas of reality and product augmentation. Ultimately, by the end of the conference I had the sincere sense that we’ve only taken our first steps toward a future of totally ubiquitous connection, but that we’re about to break into a sprint.