Spring forward, fall back: 5 new media conferences watched from a distance
A communications trend ran out of steam in the past year, yet few noticed, because it was mostly futile to begin with: conferences are no longer being tweeted about in real-time like it’s 2009. Oh, it was fun while it lasted, resulting in several pieces of recap coverage for Mondoville through the fall and winter that didn’t require more effort than watching the observations scroll by with every refresh of the hashtag, even if it went on for several hours. By the spring thaw, though, it seemed the smarter attendees at new media speaking events realized there wasn’t much point in re-pecking every platitude from the podium. This coverage via Twitter didn’t disappear — especially among those striving to justify to a boss the expense of being out of the office for a day — but its rhetorical value has definitely diminished.
However, in the effort to wrap this season, here’s a recap of attempts to explain this confab culture through May and June. And, for the sake of the future, hopefully the next wave of these gatherings will go where they haven’t gone before. How much more of this uncertain bluster can the market bear?
Canada 3.0, held at the Stratford, Ontario campus of the University of Waterloo May 10-11, was most notable for federal industry minister Tony Clement proclaiming that the country is falling behind on the tech front and needs a new strategy. Rather than take that as an indictment of their lack of traction, of course, the panelists felt vindicated by the fact that nobody else has figured it out. Kevin Newman, the Global National anchor who announced he was leaving television to do some unspecified internet thing, was therefore the perfect MC for the event — which ended with the compilation of 15 new ideas about creating, learning, changing, empowering and revolutionizing. How could anyone be discouraged by this? Public policy entrepreneur David Eaves was, seeing it more as an event about trying to save Canada 1.0 than calculate how to discard entirely with the old media system. “What no one wants to suggest is that we may not be managing a transition,” he wrote after the conference. “We may be managing death.”
mesh 2010, which took over the MaRS Centre on May 18-19, went from the kind of event where Mayor David Miller, a social media flack from PepsiCo, and editors of citizen journalism websites were all put on a pedestal last year for no common denominator except that they all liked Twitter, to an apparently more intense philosophical gathering where attendees were left to wonder what it’s all for. Which meant less to throw spitballs at from afar, but these were fraught times, especially when it came to contemplating just how much private information from Canadians was being left to the devices of Facebook — which infamously complicated its settings just in time for this conference. A panel featuring Ontario privacy commissioner Ann Cavoukian, streamed live and telecast later on TVO’s show The Agenda, was jam packed with justifiable paranoia. Left behind was the sense that social media was spiralling beyond citizen control. Who could hawk a new business model at a time like this?
The Canadian Association of Journalists held their annual conference in Montreal on May 28-29, even as the association itself was fighting for life, reliant on a core of old-timers to keep the faith in a freelance world. (More solvent, evidently, is the newspaper association event Ink & Beyond — which was held earlier that month in Toronto.) Amusingly, the most attention granted the CAJ event took the form of a posting on the Canadian Journalism Foundation’s insider news site J-Source, which reported that Globe and Mail editor-in-chief John Stackhouse announced he would be relaunching the newspaper in the fall as “a daily magazine” — even though this was verifiably untrue, and the site’s ethics editor Ivor Shapiro had to issue a mea cupla for his ineptitude in real-life reporting. Speaking of which, David Akin, who tweeted that Gordon Lightfoot was dead, then rationalized it as just doing his job, gave a presentation gloating about his own Twitter expertise.
NXNEi, the parallel to the SXSW interactive gathering which stirred more interest in recent years than the adjacent indie rock bacchanal in Austin, Texas, debuted at the Hyatt Regency Toronto on June 15-16. But, the panel lineup was conspicuously crowdsourced, which explains the tritely provocative panel titles like “Social Media Circle Jerk” and “Death of the Critic” — which left those folks tweeting the proceedings wishing for something more constructive. Naturally, they had to fly the new media accomplishment in from out of town, like viral video icon Ze Frank and once-vanishing Wired writer Evan Ratliff. But otherwise, this interactive portion only shed light on the decades-wide chasm between headlining NXNE musical icons like Iggy Pop and De La Soul, and the quote-unquote “rock stars” nervously dabbling in digital media. Some truth emerged in a panel called “The Community Builders” featuring Alan Cross and Erica Ehm — clearly, the way to get paid for new media in the 21th century is to have been on radio and TV a decade or two beforehand.
Book Summit 2010, held at Harbourfront Centre on June 18, promised to answer all the big questions about “HOT NEW MODELS.” The most newsworthy nugget, though, was New York Times technology columnist David Pogue apparently feeling liberated enough in a foreign country to concede that he doesn’t know anyone under age 25 who subscribes to a print newspaper. Conversely, the Toronto Star’s publishing reporter Vit Wagner was caught gloating that he’s a stubborn abstainer from social media. Oh, and they discussed books, whatever those are — collected by author Mark Leslie in his top 10 takeaways, while finding it curious that no one trying to sell words on paper for a living was tapped for their insights. So, as legendary local shop This Ain’t the Rosedale Library faced eviction the next day, corporate publishing was apparently too preoccupied with their own worries to notice.