Douglas Rushkoff's new social media conference

BB pal Douglas Rushkoff has launched a new one-day conference to explore alternatives futures of social media outside the context of marketing and what he sees as the overwhelming corporate influence on today's Web. The event takes place October 20 at the Angel Orensanz Center in New York City. From Doug's site:

Social media offer us an opportunity more spectacular than purchasing video greetings from American Idol contestants for our Facebook friends. They offer us the ability to play an active, conscious role in the development of our networked human future: from distributed communications networks impervious to the censorship of corporate or government regimes to new modes of value creation and exchange, or new open source democratic participation to collective consciousness and expression.

So, in a world now overflowing with networking events, I decided to launch a new conference – Contact – a counter-conference, if you will, dedicated to folding the edges of net culture back to the middle where they belong.

The Internet was prefigured not by Wired but by BoingBoing and Mondo2000. The net revolution is happening on the streets of Cairo, not the Facebook page of PepsiCorp. And social networking is less a tool for kids to agree upon a brand of sport shoe than the unemployed workers of Cleveland to support their collective renaissance.

I’m tired of bemoaning the commercialization of the net, and would rather simply take it back or build another one capable of realizing the tremendous evolutionary potential that these media appeared to hold in store for us as they emerged twenty years ago.

"Party Like It's 1992" (rushkoff.com)

Contact 2011 (contactcon.com)

• [Douglas Rushkoff]

  I wouldn’t really frame Contact as a “moral” conference, either. Just an effort to restore some of unrealized potential of the medium – or at least to talk about whether human beings can still influence the direction of some these media and tools. I don’t think one can hold a conference to thwart commercialism – but one can reinforce, support, and even find funding for initiatives that promote some of the net’s unrealized potentials.

  If you look at some of the projects being developed by Contact participants, I think you’d agree that many of them might be worthwhile.

  I still think the world we live in can be influenced by our actions, and that there’s a lot of us out here who might benefit from knowing each other.

• [Rezwan]

  I think this is a brilliant and timely idea! We’ve just scratched the surface of social media. There are plenty of things to try. This proposed Citizen Budget Balancing App for example. Not doable right this minute – but heading in the right direction : ) No time for bemoaning, there is work to be done.

• [Rezwan]

  True, there are a lot of corporations shilling nonsense on the net, but that’s part of the chaos of a big city. I got to address this recently, after getting roped into setting up the Alumni page for my alma mater. We gave some thought to how to use the medium from a City Planner’s perspective:

  “Facebook is a fascinating, growing, evolving cyber mega-city. Jane Jacobs would no doubt provide a brilliant description of the chaotic and fertile interactions that take place while strolling around the streets (or rather, “pages” and “walls”) of this city.

  As planners, we’d like to boldly explore the self-organizing possibilities inherent in this social media tool. We’ve set up this space to connect with each other on a personal level, professional level, and project level. We’d like to leverage this page (and others) to the fullest extent and see what emerges. Join us to reconnect, and also to engage in this fun social experiment!”

  More »

• [Christopher de la Torre]

  I wholeheartedly support the event in the context Rushkoff frames here. In many cases, communicating on the Internet has become the equivalent of meeting strangers on the street, in the subway, at the cafe—even at school—who are nothing more than corporate ad jockeys. There is less concern with knowledge building and problem solving than with ROI and profit forecasting. I’m fairly certain this effort isn’t ‘anti-corporation’… In any event, how successful would it be with such a directive? Arguably, there’s nothing wrong with expanding capitalism and free market ideals (greed and deception addressed, of course), but I believe Rushkoff makes mention of the vast corporate control of the web in order to frame the initiative in terms the rest of us can readily understand.

  There is much more to accomplish with the medium than we realize and it would be irresponsible not to explore other options outside of the corporate context (i.e. without at least the promise of capital gain, some of the brightest ideas are relegated to a one-legged man at an ass-kicking contest).

  As Kevin Kelly put it in his 2009 Wired article (link below), global collectivism isn’t your grandfather’s socialism. Nothing to be afraid of here! It’s not about destroying corporate growth as much as it is about curbing it so as to give other forms of constructive activity throughout the medium their due space—and there is plenty of space in cyberspace! Take the corporations out of the equation (giving them their due praise, of course) and level the intellectual playing field. (Then we can begin to address apathy and adolescent-ization and put the ‘glamor’ back into thought and invention. But I digress.)

  My point is this: you can pick your friends and you can pick your context, but you can’t pick your friends’ context—which makes it even more difficult to connect for the common good via what has become perhaps the most significant social paradigm in the history of the species. We need to put serious investment into collective endeavors outside of the monetary profit context. Because, contrary to what corporate reality has proven time and again, it’s not ‘always-already’ all about the Benjamins.

  I for one look forward to the conference.

  http://www.wired.com/culture/culturereviews/magazine/17-06/nep_newsocialism

• [mick travis]

  “I’m tired of bemoaning the commercialization of the net,”

  Yet there will be a lot of bemoaning at this conference one would reckon.

• [hammerzeit]

  I dunno, I’m as skeptical of this as I’d be of a conference to make a “more christian” internet. How do you layer morality (and anti-corporatism is just as much of a moral stand as pro-christianity) onto the internet? And why would you want to? Isn’t the great thing about the internet the way it resists any directed attempts to manipulate it? When groups who don’t get the internet try to do this, we lambast them for failing to understand this point — what’s the difference here?

• [Anonymous]

  That’s a good question, just as I imagine the ones asked at this conference will be. Personally, as someone who has sat through too many Social Marketing meetings, I’m skeptical of the internet’s complete ability to resist manipulation (that is, to not acquire an increasingly greater bias towards content served in the interest of a few) as fake profiles begin to overtake real ones, and increasing joblessness starts to turn a majority of one’s social network peers into stealth affiliate marketers to pay the bills – and worse, organizations like Centcom generating turing test-lite friendly propaganda commenters (am I one? are you?) I dislike the idea of half the comments on blogs or Facebook someday being paid responses nearly indistinguishable from those that are actual attempts to converse with the possibility of understanding.

  I don’t know if an alternate internet, or even any organized action at all is the right answer, but I suspect studying and asking about the possibility may teach us much.

  …I’m also not sure that anti-corporatism is best framed as a “moral” stance – or at least I’d frame it pragmatically first as a stance that has a goal, in this scope, of keeping something – an open internet – from becoming as commercially-curated as the diverse dying media of our time. It seems less like opinion so much as strategy – not “thou shalt not” but “this potential problem may make a measurable negative impact on something I enjoy, so let’s talk about it and maybe act.”