Point Oh!

A lot happened at SXSW this year (and I’m not even including the music portion, which I’m posting my terrible camera phone pictures of on my Tumblr). Regardless of many people claiming that there were no great technology innovations, I got the sense that streaming video technologies like Kyte, Qik and UStream are way ahead of their time and will someday reach Twitter-like status. Oh yeah, speaking of Twitter, was anyone not Twittering at SXSW? Then, of course, there was the Sarah Lacy pile-on.

Trumping all of these trends, in my opinion, was a new awareness of online transgressions and the way different people deal with them. Regardless of how bad you felt the Sarah Lacy interview was, there was no way it justified the response from the crowd or the tsunami of social media vehemence that came afterwards. Tim Russert’s softball interview of George W. Bush didn’t even get this much criticism and that was a president in wartime. What happened to Sarah Lacy was the result of two things: she didn’t know her audience and the current state of social media technologies like Twitter give the average SXSW attendee a new way to vent to a group of highly influential like-minded group of people.

Apart from a minority of people that are willing to approach the microphone during the Q&A, most of this extremely rude reaction was due to the fact that people feel a sense of insulation in social media. If you look at the bigger players in social media, like Scoble, you can see that they quickly retracted some of their earlier vehemence since they realized in retrospect that Lacy is a real person and maybe venting their frustration isn’t worth straining a relationship with her or Business Week. Take away the insulation and people are a lot less likely to slip into these transgressions.

There was an amazing panel at SXSW that tackled this issue in virtual worlds called “Virtual Scandals and Sacrilege: Who’s grieFing Now?” The panel featurd academics from around the world discussing the behavior of people in virtual worlds and how there are groups that perpetrate acts of transgression that they would never attempt in real life. The panel discussion focused on how the users are often pitted against the system and administrators but something very interesting happened during the Q&A. The former head of governance at Linden Labs, the developer of Second Life, stated how many of the perceived actions of the administrators of SL were untrue and they actually respected the rights of virtual world “griefers” like the W Hats. By the end of the session, the man from Linden Labs was sitting with a member of the W Hats, pleasantly discussing community issues. Again, take away the insulation and the transgressions are gone.

In light of these experiences, my main takeaway from SXSW was not some new whizbang technology or an insightful keynote address. What I walked away with was a sense that in order for social media to become truly organic we need far more than just transparency. Making people take ownership of content is no use if the insulation is still there for them to act in ways that are far less sensitive than their real world behavior. Perhaps when all your social media activity is available in various personal feeds and more people are held accountable for things they have said in the past that many of these transgressions will be eliminated and there will be a more natural discourse that adds credibility to the whole medium.