Event: Chinwag Live Xmas futures, Crystal balls
December 3rd, 2008 by Wendy McAuliffe
Last night’s Chinwag event looked ahead to 2013, asking where will we be with digital media, platforms, distribution and user behaviour. If you went hoping for ground-breaking predictions and hot news on emerging innovation you’d have been sorely disappointed - little was said that hasn’t been talked about already.
However, what I found most interesting was discussions around how our hunger for an all-you-can-eat connected world is transforming the way we work, what we think about our privacy, how we build relationships etc. While we (the 30+) are trying our hardest to keep up-to-date and involved, the generation below us are growing up with connectivity being part of their DNA.
“Continuous partial attention“, a term referenced by Chinwag panellist Jamie Coomber, head of digital strategy at Profero, summed up perfectly the environment that those consumed by digital are grappling with on a daily basis. We don’t want to miss anything, and so we’re having to train ourselves to check our Twitter stream, RSS feeds, Facebook updates, wikis etc continually, in a way that isn’t affecting our productivity and concentration.
Our definition of privacy has also shifted - something that I’ve noticed about myself recently. Well-known blogger Neville Hobson who was also on the panel claimed people are becoming more comfortable with sharing personal data, as the benefits of doing so become more enticing. But this trust is misplaced he argued, with the safeguards not yet being in place for us to do this securely.
We are increasingly forging online relationships with like-minded individuals. By 2013 our relationships will be very honed-in, and Jamie Coomber predicted that we’ll have a network for every aspect of our lives and that we’ll adjust our engagement and intimacy from network to network. In addition, Neville Hobson argued we’ll have more choice about who we connect with and when - so for example your collection of ‘friends’ on Facebook will be more clearly segmented based on the area of your life you associate them with.
Open ID was another issue that aroused debate, with the panel agreeing that we’re far from it at present. Connectivity infrastructure, and the prevalence of proprietary systems and applications, emerged as a big trigger of frustration - we want to be able to move from application to application, or network to network, taking one profile with us. While the debate was focused on the future, discussion dwelled on the innovations that have been talked about for the past five years and are technically possible, but are still not happening. Is regulation the only thing that will change this and move us forward?
BT futurologist Jonathan Mitchener made a great summation of the event (not necessarily verbatim): “Innovation brings flexibility, but with it the need to make more decisions about how we work and how we live. We’re not ready to make those decisions yet…”
Tags: chinwag, connectivity, Jamie Coomber, neville hobson, online privacy, open ID
December 3rd, 2008 at 10:22 pm
Thanks for the excellent summary of the event. I agree with you about the predictions.
At next year’s Crystal Balls, I reckon we make the panel kick things off with a prediction for the next 5 years, then get the audience to vote for their fave. What do you think?
Glad you like the conversation though.
Sam Michels last blog post..Which overseas markets?
December 4th, 2008 at 10:38 am
Thanks Sam. I agree it would be good to kick-off the night with some big predictions. Might it also be an idea to get some pre-event debate started on the Chinwag Facebook page etc, asking for audience predictions? Would be great to have a record that we could refer back to, to see if we were right!