Sessions at SXSW Interactive 2012 about Innovation and Communication and Social Media on Tuesday 13th March

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• Contextual Communication: Crowds and Coordination

  by Riley Crane

  Human history is punctuated by revolutions in communication. Innovations ranging from the printing press to the mobile phone continually improved our communication across space and time, culminating in the Internet Age. Itself a product of crowdsourcing, the Internet can harness a community’s ability to create and analyze data, providing us with movie suggestions, online encyclopedias, and personalized search.

  Yet, these examples beg the question: how can we communicate without a pre-existing community? The winners of the DARPA Network Challenge began to answer this question by using social media to find 10 red balloons hidden across the US. But what about collaborating to find a missing child? Or coordinating a peaceful protest? Or communicating in the aftermath of a natural disaster? We are on the cusp of yet another revolution, one that could allow ad hoc communication within any crowd united by a common context. To solve this problem, we just need to rethink the way we communicate.

  • Communication
  • Crisis Response
  • Innovation
  • Social Media

  At 11:00am to 12:00pm, Tuesday 13th March

  In Salon K, Hilton Austin Downtown

  Coverage audio clip