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Nothing reveals the truth quite like humor

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I just finished reading Absurdistan, a brilliant, epic satire that follows our obscenely fat anti-hero, one Misha Vainberg, through his idealized life in the United States, his exile to Russia, and accidental involvement in the civil war of the the fictional post-Soviet Republika Absurdsvani.

Satires are hard to read – and even harder to write – but Absurdistan hit all the right notes. Our anti-hero and his anti-heroic friends never fall completely into caricature, and its hilarity only underscored how true – and how sad – the author’s observations. Two of my favorite “truths” below:

“See the, way ‘Absurdsvani’ is pronounced and spelled, it’s utterly impossible for an American to feel anything for it. You have to be able to use a country as a child’s first name to get anywhere. Rwanda Jones. Somalia Cohen. Timor Jackson. Bosnia Lewis-Wright. And then you got this Republika Absurdsvani. Hopeless.”

and

“At Accidental College, we were taught that our dreams and our beliefs were all that mattered, that the world would eventually sway to our will, fall in step with our goodness, swoon right into our delicate white arms…And it wasn’t just Accidental College. All over America, the membrane between adulthood and childhood had been eroding, the fantastic and the personal melding into one, adult worries receding into a pink childhood haze. I’ve been to parties in Brooklyn where men and women in their mid-thirties would passionately discuss the fine points of The Little Mermaid or the travails of their favorite superhero. Deep inside, we all wished to have communion with that tiny red-haired underwater bitch. We all wanted to soar high above the city, take on the earthly powers below, and champion the rights of somebody, anybody.”

On Twitter and in Real-Life, #PDF12

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It’s a grey morning in Manhattan, and I’m sitting in my still half-empty apartment, trying to process the whirlwind of the last two days at the Personal Democracy Forum’s 2012 Conference, “The Internet’s New Political Power”.

I gained almost 100 followers in the course of the two days. About every twenty seconds, I would receive a new @ mention, RT, or follower alert. (This might not be a big deal for some, but it was unprecedented for me.) This was in line with the bigger picture – #pdf12 became a trending topic in NYC and, some say, nationwide. By the end of the conference, I was toggling constantly between following the #pdf12 Twitter stream, checking my new @eileenguo interactions, taking notes by hand, and, of course, listening to the speakers.

As an anthropologist at heart, I’m really interested in the layer below those numbers. What does all of this mean for human connection? For event planning? For our attention spans? For what we learn and take away?

These are topics that I’m eager to continue exploring.

But this time, at least, it means that I learned not only about internet privacy, security, and awesome new initiatives (such as this one by MTV), I also learned which quotes would garner the most retweets and which tweets would provoke the most discussion.

It means that I partook in an amazing global conversation about everything from Lady Gaga to the Dept of Homeland Security with conference participants in the room as well as livestream watchers in 51 (@mitgc_cm correct me if I’m wrong) different countries.

It means that though I walked into the conference thinking that I didn’t know anyone, I soon found out via my Twitter feed that this was not the case. I found and tweeted up with several members of the StartingBloc tribe and had online – and offline – conversations with some of my favorite bloggers.

PDF12 was truly participatory in that sense, and Twitter helped make it so. Conferences are no longer made up of speakers behind a podium pitching to a bored audience, but an engaged public (the internet public we spoke of) commenting, questioning, and (often successfully) demanding real-time responses.

And so I left the conference inspired and exhilarated and much wiser, for sure, but also wondering, was that it? And if so, what’s next?

The constant conversation on Twitter has all but stopped, and despite the Twitter dialogue, overall the event left me feeling a little alienated. During several sessions, I sat next to people who were clearly just as active as I was online, but had no interest in conversing – live, in person – after shutting their laptops at sessions’ end.

And I guess I can kind of empathize.

After all, what single, spoken conversation can possibly replace the hum of hundreds of simultaneous tweets from worlds away?

Internet Week Recap

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I spent the past few days at 82 Mercer St, Internet Week HQ, for Internet Week New York. It was my first time at the annual event, now in its fifth year, and as a newbie I was both very impressed and a little frustrated. 
Let’s start with the good: 
The not-so-good were, for starters, logistical in nature. IWNY was over-capacity for just about every panel and definitely every “classroom session” – there was a serious lack of chairs. Considering that the week was in celebration of the world-wide web, internet service was also embarrassingly slow and spotty. The panels tended to be general and rather superficial – while I definitely learned, much of the knowledge fell into the “Oh-that’s-interesting” rather than “Oh-that’s-useful” category. 
I think that was the biggest frustration – though perhaps that says more about me than the conference itself. After all, Internet Week’s was billed as  ”a festival celebrating NYC’s thriving Internet industry & community.“ And it certainly highlighted the industry – but the panels seemed to stop short of real analysis. I wish it had gone deeper in the topics discussed and questions raised. What does this insight actually tell us about our society? What’s the application of that really interesting technology? 
I think it confirmed my professional interests in internet and communication technologies (ICT) – I didn’t start a start-up in ICT because I am inherently enamored of ICT. I actually find the internet to be incredibly distracting, and am still struggling to balance an online presence and an offline life. But I believe that ICT, when used right, has the potential to change the world – and I want to be a part of that. 
So for me, it’s all about context and applicability. Internet Week was fantastic for getting me more familiar with the space and understanding what everyone else is doing…and I’m looking forward to taking it to the next level.