Just Add Social Noor on social media

Today’s SXSW keynote given by Frank Warren (of PostSecret) has been the highlight of my SXSW experience. Warren is an engaging speaker, very down to earth, and had a great positive message. It was one of the most heartwarming talks I’ve been to in a long time. It was refreshing to be at SXSW and not hear yet another snarky panelist. Warren talked about how the project started and how it has evolved. He also shared a number of PostSecret postcards, some of them that were not included in the PostSecret books due to copyright or privacy issues. Warren attributed the overwhelming success of the project to the fact that we all have secrets and can probably identify with one of the cards. Warren stated, “All of us have a secret that will break your heart.”

I think what I really enjoyed about Warren’s talk is that this is *exactly* the sort of stuff that makes me love online communities - that ability to reach out to other people whom you may not know, identify with them on a basic human level, and create something bigger and better than anything you could have done without the connective tissue of the Internet. Throughout the talk, I kept thinking back to the 1000 journals project, an art project where participants wrote/drew in traveling journals that were eventually scanned and shared online. What I really love about PostSecret and the 1000 journals project is that these projects utilize the Internet and online communities as a tool to get organized and share with the whole world but they’re not about the technology. The important part is the art, the collaborative nature of it, and the people behind it.

If you’re interested in reading more about Warren’s keynote, CNet has posted a pretty good article.

I first started blogging way back in 2001. At the time, I was 21 and a senior in college. I was impressionable and really excited about everything that was happening on the web. I was amazed by the ability of fairly basic web software (post to database, present post to user) at offering almost anyone the ability to have their own open mic of sorts. There weren’t a lot of people blogging back then (certainly none in my social network) or participating in social media so the only blogs that I knew about where those of the “famous” brilliant people behind a lot of the early tools and blogs. I looked up to these people - I wanted my blog to make me brilliant and famous, too. Every March, they’d all blog about attending South by Southwest and I dreamed of having the opportunity to attend and be like them.

Fast forward to my mid twenties - I went off to grad school where almost every other person in my class had a blog or started one during the course of our program. I grew up a bit at this time and stopped caring (and didn’t have the time) about what was happening in the lives of the A-list bloggers. It was just so much more interesting to read about what my classmates were doing and what was happening in their lives - because it all impacted me and was part of the reality I was living at the time. I wasn’t vicariously living through somebody else’s social network - I had my own.

Fast forward to about six months ago - CHI (my “home” conference of sorts) is taking place in Italy this year, which made it impossible for me to attend. When I started brainstorming other US-based conferences to attend, SXSW immediately came to mind and I just couldn’t resist the opportunity to attend this conference that I had wanted to go to for sooooo long. I had built it up in my head for so many years and I really couldn’t contain my excitement and anticipation the whole week prior to the conference.

Today marked my third day at SXSW and it has been a really bizarre experience. There are times when I feel like I’ve been swallowed whole into the tubes of the interwebs. I keep seeing “famous” people walking around and all I can think, “OMG! IT’S [INSERT A-LIST BLOGGER/INTERNET FAMOUS PERSON] FROM [BLOG/URL]! OMG!” I keep imagining these people walking around with their URL and Technorati rank floating above their heads (sort of like the Sims). All the while, I couldn’t help but feel like I was back in high school again.

I hated high school.

And that’s really what SXSW feels like when you’re a nobody. There are the cool popular kids (the “Internet famous”), the semi-popular kids who hang out with the popular kids (these are usually the people who are dating the Internet famous or who happen to work at the same startup), the unpopular kids who aspire to be popular and want to hang out with the popular kids even if it means tolerating hanging out with the semi-popular kids, and the geeks/dorks/nerds. At SXSW, I’ve reverted to my high school status of geekdom. In high school, I attended classes and shunned extra-curricular activities and parties. And that’s essentially what I’ve been doing at SXSW - selectively attending panels and avoiding the parties.

It’s not to say that I’m not finding it valuable or entertaining as an experience. I’m really glad I finally got the opportunity to go and get it out of my system. But I can’t say that I’m having fun or that I’d ever go back.

It’s just been really fascinating (and bizarre) to be peripherally part of this subculture that has its own celebrities and its own gossip. But once you step away from all of that and get back to the real world, nobody really has any clue what you’re talking about.

And the irony of it all is that these now popular people were probably just as geeky as me in high school.