Attended the Yahoo! Provoke Summit on day 1 of Internet Week here at HQ. Highlights:
Today Ze Frank wondered why the Internet has fallen prey to that most insidious of plagues, the cult of the young. The child-god, he mused, is at the heart of so much of the joy and serendipity of the Net, but also has left it a bit of a ship without a rudder, at least from the corporate/brand manager/clients’ perspective. Everyone trying to find a way to be less afraid of the beast wants to tame it, but it’s a beast that can’t be tamed. I once trotted out that word of mouth can’t be ‘leveraged’ only fueled; some clients agreed, some vehemently disagreed. Regardless, I’d say Ze was suggesting that you can’t tame/leverage the internet/connectivity beast, but you can feed/fuel it. And while feeding it may make it bigger, it may also make it friendlier. May.
A funny panel hosted by Nick Parish tossed off the now-usual platitudes about the iPad as content consumption device, and the death of the American educational system, but while talking about MakerBot, Stickybits and augmented reality, a few pieces started to come together that I’ll post more about another time, but here are a few choice bits: that kids have grown up in an era of hardware that is closed to them – they can’t get in and muck about and so have only a consumer/user understanding of tech; the thing that might be missing (or might be wildly more full of possibility) is the notion of make believe – in other words, how much you can both absorb and imagine… Hard to know yet whether kids growing up in a system of closed devices but infinite stimulus have greater or lesser imaginations.
And finally, Iain Tait from W+K spoke about the need to move beyond merely new ways of doing things to making and doing new things. In the process he talked about the need for creative cultures that are about sharing, putting ideas out there, and focus on the collective win. These are traditionally pretty feminine traits. (Curious then that the only woman during the event was Mollie Spilman of Yahoo!, the moderator and facilitator.) Wondering if despite the usual lopsided gender ratios the Internet is somehow becoming a bit more, well, girly. In the meantime he’s inspired me to think about how to help clients and colleagues alike deal with the fact that dust won’t settle, and that we’re going to have to not just make lots of stuff, but really invest in it.
Ok, now wondering where my next drink is coming from.
Cheers.
Posted by Farrah Bostic via email from prettylittlehead
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