Am I [Still] Here…Yet? — Life after Pop!Tech

“For experience, when it is not communicated to another, must wither within and be worse than lost.” 
— Norman Mailer

I was a Pop!Tech virgin before arriving in Camden on Wednesday.  As likely happens with any experience, I came with a set of assumptions.  I found it to be a great privilege to be a part of the conversation to re-imagine America (the theme of this year’s conference), but I wondered, what were we all looking to achieve?  Towards the end of the conference one attendee presumed we were all looking for a type of “healing.”  I would interpret that feeling as the desire for an opportunity or entry point — a means to use the raw feelings of disappointment or anger, or compassion we have with America’s social and political landscape, as a catalyst for a monumental shift.

Yet, the conversation about the re-design of America’s systems and the norms that inform them were not always focused on an actionable plan or concrete solution.  In fact, before the conference began, Andrew Zolli, Pop!Tech’s organizer, announced as a disclaimer, perhaps to both the idealists and the cynics, that we would not be coming up with a singular solution to the world’s challenges in these four days.  Fair enough.  Rather the conversations intended to motivate us to rethink and re-evaluate our own assumptions.

While I think it is important to embrace overarching themes of collective action, I think we should also remind ourselves of the power of the individual in these times of citizen journalism and the connected Web.

Fiction writer Anthony Doerr took the stage, dedicating his essay “Am I Still Here" "to all of you who have your laptops open” in the balcony, and then he began “Our unconnected time is dwindling fast.”  His essay is a humorous and haunting account of his relationship with his evil twin Z, who is sustained by Internet content, email, and social networks.  The essay had the audience laughing when Doerr contrasted his Thoreu-like accounts of his present-thinking in the mountains that are interrupted with Z’s need to stay digitally connected, “I’m weak, hisses Z. I’m hungry. I need to see a picture of Joe Biden.” 

I myself am torn.  The irony that I am tweeting quotes while he describes how drugged we are with online content, is not lost on me.  I am fascinated with the sacrifice of our rendezvous with the real world in order to solidify our online identities, to feed our own evil twins, who are addicted to the wired universe.  And yet, the psychology behind this new anxiety, the validation of our existence through digital interconnectedness, can dually empower us and move us to political action.

Earlier in the conference, in a session "American Stories", Erica Williams, a Washington DC-based activist who works to get under-represented communities to take part in the political process, immediately identified herself as a Millennial (a member of the generation born between 1978-2000).  In the same breath, she asked the audience to set aside any pre-conceived notions that they may have had about the Millennials, Being a  Millennial myself, I am reminded of the stereotypes that I’ve known to be thrust upon digital youth: slacktivist, apathetic, distracted, online junkies feeding on the interconnected addictions that Doerr mentions.  But, as Williams had pointed out, it is this type of addiction that is beginning to reframe American politics, transforming traditional forms civic engagement (bumper stickers, yard signs, town halls, and even, ahem, voting).   22 million voters under the age of 30 voted in the Presidential campaign, supporting Barack Obama because he adopted the frameworks that, we Millennials, use as tools as a means to voice our political and social consciousness and concern.  Blogs, digital media, Facebook, etc, are all powerful platforms for a new type of oral testimony, a virtual soapbox to let politicians, policy makers, and older generations of traditional media know that we are here, and to let ourselves know that we are not isolated or immobilized by our existential woes.

Nick Bilton’s talk, “(Re)mixed messages,” focused on harnessing our digital media savvy (not just the Millennials’!), and the changing concept of trust to embrace our obligatory roles as citizen journalists.  Bilton emphasized that because we can access content virtually anywhere, we no longer prioritize traditional news sources that are closest to us, rather relying on “news media 29 percent and our friends and family 90 percent.”  Bilton highlights the first newspaper, The Publick Occurences, in New Amsterdam (now New York City), where some pages were left blank for people to write their own content in the back, contributing their own storytelling and passing it on.  Bilton goes on to say that because of mobile phones and our umbilical cord to the Internet “we all have a printing press.”  “It’s changing everything, swinging the pendulum back to the middle,” he says.  Bilton recognizes that this constant documentation (uploading videos, pictures, live commentary through tweets and blogs) has become a new paradigm for storytelling leaving us “a social responsibility to report news.”

With the new landscape comes a new relationship with the way we understand our new sources of content based on the device upon which we are reading them. Our relationship with the news changes because we are reading it from a mobile phone.  There is a new type of literacy we have to consider.  Bilton mentions a study where
“net naive people and net savvy people,  [are] reading a book and surfing the web, and the net savvy peoples’ brains light up twice as much as do the net naive peoples’ when they’re surfing the web.  There is a new type of comprehension at work here.”

I think a huge barrier to the adoption of social media or frustration from people new to this medium, is a fear that the tools weren’t necessarily meant for them because they jumped on the bandwagon too late.  They didn’t.  I usually take the stance that there are no experts with social media, only amateurs who are passionate, eager storytellers becoming literate in the “language.”

I am going to leave you with a thought from Joan Didion, who reminds me to clear my digital throat and raise our voices, our individual cries of content, to help shape a collective narrative and move us to be socially proactive.

“Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant re-arrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.”

This Millenial spent all of the Pop!Tech conference with paper and pen, in her private notebook but, yes, Joan is pushing us to be brave. We must collaborate with the civic journalists hidden around us, those aching to tell their story, in the virtual world and the real one.