Every year, thousands of bands, bloggers, filmmakers, social media gurus and entrepreneurs come to the South By Southwest Music, Film and Interactive festival in Austin, Texas. When I joined the MCDM program in 2008 and heard about SXSW, I started to work on plans to be actively involved. Sooner than expected I had the opportunity to participate on one of the music panels—and got to spend a week soaking in the latest in digital media, while enjoying entertainment and Southern hospitality. Attending SXSW was well worth the lessons, networking contacts and, sometimes, the free food.

Pitching a panel

Last November, at the Showbox in downtown Seattle, I met with the SXSW music committee, which was accepting submissions from bands, record labels, and anyone else who wanted to pitch an idea. For the past two years, I have been filming a documentary on legendary blues singer Huddie “Lead Belly” Ledbetter and using the MCDM program as a testing ground for the documentary’s online marketing and digital distribution strategies. I successfully pitched an MCDM-inspired panel based on the evolution of Lead Belly’s music from analog recordings to digital formats. Staying true to the digital storytelling code of honor, my presentation, “Lead Belly to Ludacris: From Analog to Digital,” included a video mash up I produced especially for the panel. The video mixed a rare performance of Lead Belly with hip-hop artist Ludacris covering a popular folk song. (You can read a review of my panel in the Austin Chronicle.)

Best of SXSW

In addition to presenting, I learned about a few innovative technologies and saw some great films at SXSW. Here are some of the highlights:

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For years, I only knew of George Lucas’ 1977 cinematic sci-fi breakthrough as “Star Wars.”  Then I found out that it was part of a trilogy. But wait, Lucas had a plan all along; this tale of an oppressed rag-tag alliance looking to overturn a hierarchical, monopolistic political system (aka “The Empire”) was always meant to be “Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope.”

Of course, in a multi-part saga, if the good guys get their way initially, the Empire is always going to have to Strike Back to make it a good story. When I read Groundswell co-author Josh Bernoff’s The Splinternet Means the End of the Web’s Golden Age, that’s what immediately came to mind.

We’ve been declaring an end to media monopolies for a while now, thanks to networked communities who no longer require institutional intermediaries to share, collaborate or take collective action.  This ability to produce and consume media for almost free threatened the very economic model that media moguls had taken to the bank for over a century. As I made my own transition from corporate media journalist to independent content creator, I took advantage of new, inexpensive tools that we saw as the great democratizer of production.

Apple was part of this rebellion, helping us to crash through the barriers to entry with the digital weaponry of firewire, USB, Final Cut Pro, iDVD — this filmmaker’s “secret plans to the Death Star,” so to speak.  As digital content proliferated, The Empire writhed in agony, from The New York Times to Conde Nast to NBC, desperately in search of new business models.  Now, with renewed focus on pay walls and walled gardens, Bernoff sees Apple’s new iPad as the turning point as we leave the Web’s hopeful first age of universality and openness:

…[M]ore and more of the interesting stuff on the Web is hidden behind a login and password. Take Facebook for example. Not only do its applications not work anywhere else, Google can’t see most of it. And News Corp. and the New York Times are talking about putting more and more content behind a login…Each new device has its own ad networks, format, and technology. Each new social site has its login and many hide content from search engines. Read more…

I apologize in advance if you currently have Shirky overload, but I just read a transcript of a speech he gave at the Web 2.0 conference last week and I highly recommend you check it out. It’s short, and it’s good. Trust me.

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Posted by: Hanson Hosein

In our most recent class, we explored Clay Shirky’s powerful notion that social media has suddenly made the organization of people “ridiculously easy.”

We are living in the middle of a remarkable increase in our ability to share, to cooperate with one another, and to take collective action, all outside the framework of traditional institutions and organizations.

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