grace

… filling in the negative space with positively everything

SXSW 2009 Post-Mortem : An Interactive Tale Full of Sound and Fury

Entering the Microsoft TechSet Bloggers Lounge at SXSW this year was like stepping into a living tag cloud: the words “social media,” “online,” “Twitter,” “Facebook,” “blog,”"twitterati,” “social media,” “retweet,” “startup,” “hashtag,” “social media,” and - did I already say this? - “social media” hovered over the laptop-and-cable crowded tables. Energy was high as people connected online and offline, sharing ideas, information, and the occasional gossip. You got the impression something big, something cutting edge, was happening there.

Then it hit me. During a visit to the lounge, I had a Daily Show “Moment of Zen.” As one blogger raced around the room asking for retweets, the room turned into a scene from Shakespeare’s Macbeth:

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

The pomp, urgency, self-importance, adulation bordering on idolatry…it was all farce. If the Internet made the world flat, it also created a new class stratosphere: Web-Celebrity, populated by people whose biggest claims to fame are the numbers of followers and “friends” they have in online social networking sites. As James Wolcott said of self-styled celebrity Ann Coulter, the Web-Celeb is like “the Paris Hilton of postmodern politics, an elongated zero, a white-hot sex symbol symbolizing nothing” - after all, they may be hot, but what real substance, what genuine value, do they create?

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