Add an eventSessions at SXSW Interactive 2011 about Facebook on Friday 11th March
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David vs. Goliath: Lessons learned from Lamebook vs. Facebook
by Chris Conner, Edward Cavazos, JS and Genitempo
Growing internet access and a hyper-evolved societal awareness built in to the humor of our age have led to an explosion of Neo-Swiftian cultural critique in every area imaginable: art, literature, film, gaming, social networking, food, politics, business and even parody itself.
The Daily Show now provides our Modest Proposal every evening, Cervantes acolytes all over the world ruthlessly skewer our holy cows from their blogs, forcing us to laugh at ourselves and the institutions we create and support. While parody and satire are inarguably essential to humankind’s dialectic with itself, the same tools that have raise our collective voice are being utilized by powerful forces to squelch us.
Facebook is dragging offending sites into court with a vengeance. Celebrities sue bloggers with a regularity one can set their watch to. Even Blizzard Entertainment–of World of Warcraft fame–forced the pulping of tens of thousands of copies before the release of a satirical book.
So what do the jesters do when the giant doesn’t have a sense of humor? A balance must be struck between the rights of individuals and institutions and the rights of others to mock them.
The purpose of this panel is to assess the present health of parody in New Media (however broadly defined), discuss its evolving role in our discourse, and to develop a prognosis for its future that will enable to prescribe the right strategy to protect those who hold the mirror to a world of naked emperors.
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Focusing In On the Future of Social Photography
Instagram closes $7 million in funding. Path supposedly rebuffs a $120 million acquisition offer from Google. Over a 100 million photos are uploaded to Facebook each day. There is a renaissance in social photography. The relatively new field, started by Flickr only a few years ago and dominated by Facebook today is seeing a flurry of new, predominantly mobile entrants, all showing promising early traction. Photos are becoming instantly shareable and are being marked-up with a vast array of data from face-tags to geo-location to paint a more complete story of the "captured moment" than ever before. We explore the convergence of photography with mobile and social technologies, discuss whether the new startups in this field are fad or future, and imagine what the long-term future of social photography might look like, including its cultural, commercial, and social implications.
LEVEL: Intermediate