I went to the Online Information 2007 conference on Thursday last. The first session, The Facebook Generation, had three presenters, Roo Reynolds, Ewan McIntosh and Mary Ellen Bates. The talks were thought provoking and Ewan was an entertaining presenter. However, I found that I took very few notes and found rather disappointing the level of insight, which far too closely approximated my own.
One comment from Ewan stuck with me in particular. He spoke of the motivation and talent of young people. These guys spend hours creating things such as videos for posting on YouTube, or solving games. Contrast this with the effort put in to homework, for example - the things we give them to do. How do we harness this energy and enthusiasm in the workplace?
Yet, young people have always been creating. Sure things are different; they have different tools and their output has a potentially massive audience (you had to be really bad to get this level of attention before). However, does this really give them a greater insight into the world of business? Are they really any more savvy than we were as we took our first naiive steps into the workplace? I'm not convinced.
Roo spoke of spending time in virtual worlds as a constructive use of time. The opportunity to meet and chat. Whilst I can accept that these conversations can be valuable I don't think they scale very well. Contrast this sort of idea with the thoughts McAfee has
posted on strong and weak ties, and the tools that can help to strengthen or establish weak ties. It seems to me that virtual worlds offer a poor way to achieve this goal. There is no certainty of finding anyone in SL that is a) willing to hold a conversation on a pre-determined topic and b) that this will have any ROI (I'm talking work stuff here). As a tool, virtual worlds suffer from being real time.
UPDATE: a warning worth heeding.
"What has happened to us is an amazing invention, computers and the internet and TV, a revolution. This is not the first revolution we, the human race, has dealt with. The printing revolution, which did not take place in a matter of a few decades, but took much longer, changed our minds and ways of thinking. A foolhardy lot, we accepted it all, as we always do, never asked "What is going to happen to us now, with this invention of print?" And just as we never once stopped to ask, How are we, our minds, going to change with the new internet, which has seduced a whole generation into its inanities so that even quite reasonable people will confess that once they are hooked, it is hard to cut free, and they may find a whole day has passed in blogging and blugging etc." -- Doris Lessing, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 2007.
Later, in a panel consisting of Richard Dennison, Matt Locke and Roo Reynolds and moderated by Roger James I was similarly disappointed. Matt had some interesting insights and his
six spaces of social media is intriguing and worthy of further thought.
UPDATE: This post has a negative overtone that I do not entirely intend. In expressing my disappointment I mean no disrespect to the speakers, I think this is a function of the subject matter. Either this area is evolving at a sedentary rate or, more likely, because I'm actively keeping myself informed there just isn't that much new. Organisations are slowly adopting Social Software (Enterprise 2.0) tools and waking up to the potentials, and I think Ernst & Young is on or ahead of the curve, but it has involved the constant repetition of the same arguments to make these inroads.
