MediaFutures and the Remembrance of Media past.

On Friday I attended the MediaFutures Conference, put on just before Mashed08 up at Alexandra Palace this weekend. It was interesting on a number of fronts.

Firstly, the layout of the room - to the right and centre looking from the stage were round tables and chairs, on the left a whole load of sofas with extension cords. The new meedja bloggeurs mostly went to couches with their laptops, the old stream media mostly sat at the tables.

Secondly, the wifi worked perfectly. This is most unusual at any form of New Media conference in my experience.

Thirdly, the presenters and topics were (by design I'm sure) quite provocative to all parties there, this was quite refreshing as I find pure "New Media" or pure "Old Media" conferences tend to wax too much on the side of their preferred beliefs.

Anyway - a brief precis of the day (all the speakers bios are on the website linked above, so go there for details - also presentations will be added over time):

First up - Dr Brian Winston, who talked about "Unknown Unknowns", ie trying to put some structure around thinking about those things we cannot predict about how and where the media will evolve. Here are some nuggets that resonated with me:

- Rogers' original technology adoption curve (Moore's Chasm is based on this) was based on a group of Iowa farmers adoption of new seeds in the late 1940's. Extrapolating to modern Geek tech is risky

- "The Law of the Suppression of Radical Potential" - New Technology is introduced into the mass market insofar as it doesn't upset anybody, tends to be clocked for a long time if it does.

- The reason why university education will never go online is students' need for sex. (Except for IT of course)

There was quite a long debate between Peter Day and Brian Winston, and various members of the audience, who, instead of asking questions, rambled on about their own hobby horses. I really reckon we need a sort of 1 minute question rule for the audience. We were getting restive on the couches and the Twitter backstream started up. The observation was made that at one point the people on stage and doing the "questioning" were all more mature people wearing chinos and grumbling about modern technology, and the term Chino Crisis was coined by your correspondent ( who else ;0 ) - and it is spreading .

Anyway, next up were a series of presentations of research of what actual users are doing:

Alex McKie showed us some research that showed the mass of user behaviours and motivations has not changed that much at all, much of the supposed behaviour shift that is blogged about incessantly is really only still done by a tiny proportion of people. Takeaways I noted were:

- when people who have downloaded all heir stuff from iTunes find they can't move the media on to other devices, thats when the kickback really kicks in - she thinks Apple is storing up trouble there.

- most people find it easier to believe in magic that understand how a lot of modern technology works (the A C Clarke law)

- put your money on the technologies that allow people to gossip.

An outfit called Plot then asked us to think about how our usage of media had changed in the last 10 years and played some interviews of people's views. My biggest shift has been the near ubiquity of my laptop...it now allows me to have a "packet" based timestream - I was listening to the speakers and was active online. I do find in conferences the actual speaking is sometimes far slower than my mind works so being able to fill in is useful - and this was one of those times. Maybe its "continual partial attention" but I don't think so - if I know the subject or where is going I can do something else for a few moments.

Then a debate about what the media is for today. They had Andrew Keen (author and arch sceptic of New Media), Charlie Beckett of Polis (a Think Tank), Andrew Calcutt of UEL, chaired by Claire Fox of the Institute of Ideas. I'd like to say that this session was a sharp exchange and rebuttal of ideas, but it seemed to me that the protagonists were mostly talking past each other and banging their own drums. Even though they were using the same (buzz)words, meaning were often different/vague so it was hard to work out what they meant. Judging by the Twitterstream I wasn't the only one with this impression. The only thought that was new to me was this re Citizen Media

- if there was any real power in it, no one in media would invite the citizens in! Inclusiveness is tool to get exclusives

Andrew Keen does have a way with words to rile up the Geeknoscenti, these were a few goodies:

- he noted that the Social Media bubble is bursting, and his view of "Web 3.0" is that it will be when the professionals seize back the New Media.

- "Web2.0 - the technology is more advanced than Web1.0, but the conversation is more backward"

Lunch, and the session split into 3 breakouts - "Skills in the Innovation Process", "OpenNess and Innovation", and I was giving a talk on the "Myths of FreeConomics" in the "Provocations / Show and Tells" stream. I'm afraid I wasn't really concentrating on the Show and Tells as my laptop had chosen that moment to misbehave so I was busy getting it back up, so my apologies to those people. In my session, other Agents Provocateurs were Milverton Wallace who talked about the "Browserisation" of the TV experience (we will expect the TV to look / work more like an interactive browsable menu) and seasoned observer Martin Huckerby whose main issue was the incredibly poor standard of factual reporting in the Tech Blogosphere / Journosphere, noting that hype springs eternal.

I missed most of the next session as I had a few other things to attend to, but got back in time for the last session, where Rory Cellan Jones chaired, and Norman Lewis, Sean Phelan (who founded Multimap) and Prof Patrick Barwise (LBS) talked about models of Innovation and Development.

Norman has done a lot of work about kids' behaviour in Social Networks, and noted that a lot of the growth is because our society is risk averse so that they go out far less than in previous generations, and so use social nets to talk to each other. (This was echoed in an earlier session with a comment that Bebo is more about anticipation and talking about something that may happen (eg something like a sleepover that older people took for granted in their youth). Norman did not tell us why there is such risk aversion though, which to me surely is the big question? The rest of the session was a panel discussion, here are some notes I took:

- Microfinance in Africa - lenders increasingly only lend to women as men just spend it on themselves, mobile phones and beer

- Patents are becoming an increasingly devalued currency, in R&D, R is dropping and D is rising - short term good, long term bad

- in 25 years time, most 40 yr olds (todays 15 year olds) will have the same long commutes, mortgages, kids, will watch c 25 hrs of TV a week, and it still wont be UGC

- Children are not naturally good with the technology, its just that they have no preconceived structure or fear to impede them

The last session of the day was the bar - my favourite sort of Liquid Conversation (I have remarked before on the roles of Alcohol in Social Networks and this was great fun - lots of fascinating people to talk to, ideas to bat around etc.)

I'd say it was an "interesting" conference, in that it was quite "edgy" as there was a lot more poking of sticks at comfortable sacred cows than conferences which are more themed and tend to preach to the faithful, and Nico MacDonald and the organisers are to be credited for that in my view. I thought the Web 2.0 scene took quite a few well deserved pokes, and my overall view of the "median" MSM folks is that there is probably still far too much of a remembrance of a media past. The risk of such a conference is that believers go away grumpy after a dose of heresy, so reading the other blogs should be interesting (see here for eg).