Keynote Interview with Doug Rushkoff and Erick Schonfeld:
Facebook's Days Are Numbered: How social media resists all
efforts to make it otherwise;
Instead of connecting to one
another, we are increasingly connected to and friended by the same
old brands and institutions that the Internet once stood a chance
of upending. And worst of all, we the people are getting into the
act, learning to sell our friends to the highest bidder. Whether
it’s a Zynga game inviting us to turn over our address books
for points, or an advertiser offering us a chance to win a prize
for “friending” them publicly, we are now in the
business of marketing our friendships to those who hope to exploit
the bonds we have created with others.
In doing so, we reduce the
real value of those bonds, as well as the entire potential for
peer-to-peer connection. The real opportunity of social
networking looks a lot more like Burning Man
and WikiLeaks than it does like P&G’s
word-of-mouth campaign or whatever Twitter is hatching in
its new analytics lab.
We are building the social organism together.
That’s all the Internet has been doing from the beginning.
But it seems as soon as we develop a new tool or strand of
connectivity, it is hijacked by business, robbed of its power,
and then replaced by mechanisms that connect us to things,
rather than people.
Will social networking finally accomplish the
Internet’s real goal? We have yet to see. But in the
meantime, how we use it — and what we think it to be
— will go a long way toward determining its fate.
Erick Schonfeld is the
Co-Editor of TechCrunch. He has been covering startups and
technology news since 1993.
Prior to TechCrunch, he was
Editor-at-Large for Business 2.0 magazine, where he wrote
feature stories and ran their main blog, Next Net, which had
nearly 50,000 RSS subscribers. He also does a lot of video
work and hosts regular panels of industry luminaries.
Schonfeld started his career at
Fortune magazine. In 1999, he won the prize for best
information technology submission at London’s Business
Journalist of the Year Awards, and in 2001 he won the prize
for best space submission at the Aerospace Journalist of the
Year Awards in Paris. In 1996 and 1997, Schonfeld was
recognized in the TJFR Business News Reporter’s list of
the “best and brightest financial journalists under the
age of 30.” He appears regularly on CNBC, CNN, and NY1,
and is a frequent speaker at industry conferences.
Schonfeld graduated magna cum
laude from Cornell University in 1993.
followed by
Keynote Presentation by Josh Harris: The Toothpaste
Manifesto: Netcasting in the Age of the Home Studio.
The advent of home studio (a
television studio in the home) is comparable to the advent of
home theater 20 years ago, hence the retail theatrical
experience was displaced by the home theater just as the
traditional television studios are about to be displaced by the
home studio.
Monitoring the home is refined.
Just as security companies (e.g. ADT) monitor the perimeter
of a home more vertical monitoring systems will track most
aspects of daily life. the home (and the rest of daily life
a la "the minority report") will become a series of
sound stages. so the desktop will expand to the counter top,
the fridge top and of course the bath top.
The bathtop as a theatrical
venue. Featuring just in time brushing (ergo video chat with
other people who are brushing their teeth at the exact same
moment). if cindy crawford and/or j. depp was brushing at
8:32am on monday morning you'd be there.
The Crest Oral Hygiene monitor
will watch your mouth. in the future
of toothpaste we can count on an "oral hygiene
monitoring system" run by Proctor and Gamble, Colgate or
Google. if your child misses a tooth brushing session you
can be sure that the Crest equivalent of social services will let
you know you are a bad parent.
Crest (or more likely their ad
agency) will build the "Crest Net Studio's" in order to
accommodate the above. the key to their success will be to
connect people in space and time. or in other words
just-in-time chat video brushing that assembles the most engaging
and entertaining people at the moment you start brushing.
The world that we live in will
become a series of net studio sound stages who will elevate even
the most mundane of daily rituals into engaging and entertaining
"micro day parts."
When the human condition reaches
a critical mass of micro day parts a psychic fracture (the
singularities effect) will occur. or in other words the
brain will convert from a mono tasking to multi tasking mode.
thus the hive, matrix or borg are born.
When the singularities effect
takes full force the human will no longer operate as an individual.