Dateline: Austin, TX — THE BIRD GETS A BUM RAP. As the always effervescent South By Southwest multimedia festivals explode here every year at this time, the thousands of visiting movie, web and music buffs will often complain about Austin’s ubiquitous black bird.
They regard this humble creature (though it has an elegant scientific name, Quiscalus Quiscula) as something of a downer.
Its incessant, harsh call — evoking Edgar Allan Poe‘s raven of doom — plus its deepest jet-black silhouette (though lustrously violet-blue when the March Texas light catches it) and the beady unblinking eye punctuating that blackness, together create uneasy agitation among the human lines stretching for blocks outside every over-subscribed festival event. And when the daily vast hordes of the grackle, to use its vulgaris name, gather menacingly on the telephone lines overhead they’re paying a discomfiting homage to Alfred Hitchcock‘s capacity for terror.
Aptly enough, the film section of the festival has utilized the Texas grackle — in a scarily animated cartoon form — as a recurring character for their stern interstitial pronouncements just before a movie-screening begins. It might even make phone-using offenders in the auditoriums fear for their life. One especially vicious cartoon bird dives down and rips out a talkative moviegoer’s tongue.
Real-life grackles are in fact rarely seen inside the festival venues, which fill the cavernous Austin Convention Center and overflow throughout the town’s many theaters, bars and hotel function rooms. Indeed there was nary a discordant note to be heard in any of the sessions I attended.
More’s the pity. I could have really done with the occasional intrusive, contrary squawk.
THE ‘INTERACTIVE’ DIVISION of SXSW — to use the branded acronym — played host (via remote link-ups, inevitably) to three prominent leakers: Edward Snowden (pictured below left) currently of Moscow, Julian Assange currently of the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, and Glenn Greenwald currently billed as still of The Guardian — though now going independent with The Intercept. (And incidentally Greenwald was contributing from Rio de Janeiro, but he had to leave his actual home there, to transmit from a big-city hotel where the internet connection was better.)
All three took part in Q & A sessions with SXSW attendees… but for all the controversy stirred up outside the festival — at least about having the two fugitives in the lineup — the mood inside was entirely that of visiting preachers addressing the choir.
One side-observation: It was intriguing to see Assange so strongly out-wattaged in appeal and in effect among this geeky audience… his 15 months of fame do seem to have expired a while ago. (Assange wasn’t helped by his Skype connection being iffy, compared with the Google Hangout technology that worked so well for Snowden, not to mention the ex-NSA contractor’s canny on-camera positioning, with the “We the People” opening to the U.S. Constitution’s preamble serving as his backdrop.)
By way of some contrast, a SXSW regular, danah boyd — the perpetually lower-cased internet sociologist (pictured below, right) — gratifyingly offered some actually challenging propositions. Her new book It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens (from Yale University Press) argues on the basis of nearly a decade’s worth of field research that — contrary to a still widespread shibboleth among parents and the media who want to frighten them — internet use is quite simply not harmful to teenagers. Indeed, it actually functions as a valuable antidote to the many deplorable late 20th century developments that have seriously cramped and stunted life for teenagers in America and other western industrialized societies.
As you might expect, in the SXSW context — addressing a crowded session — boyd seemed pretty much to be preaching to the choir with her theme. But it was instructive to accompany her as she carried her message well outside the festival. (She’s a relative of mine, I will add whenever I write about her work, in the interest of full disclosure.)
At BookPeople, Austin’s leading — and simply magnificent — independent bookstore, boyd encountered the same somewhat awestruck reaction as she’s met elsewhere in her bookstore tour from Charlottesville to New York to Seattle. And it was a decidedly different response from her experience at “South By” (to now use its habitués’ familiar, almost familial diminutive.)
Her bookstore audiences, which of course proportionately contain many more parents and grandparents than ever get to attend internet festivals and conferences, are typically astonished to learn what’s really going on in teenagers’ busy communication with each other online. Some (and tantalizingly only some) of American youngsters’ cryptic verbal and visual references get decoded by boyd, and more importantly some parental worries – about the “dangers” lying in wait online for their young charges… about “internet addiction” running rampant… and so on – get, if not laid to rest, then at least ascribed realistically to more appropriate sources and causes.
As boyd says,
Rather than resisting technology or fearing what might happen if youth embrace social media, adults should help youth develop the skills and perspective to productively navigate the complications…
And some of us older folk, still perhaps reflexively viewing with disdain young people’s abundant use of online social networks, should take note of this endorsement of boyd’s book. Longtime charity worker in both the U.S. and UK, Stephen Balkam says: “Astute, provocative and hopeful, this is a must-read treatise on teens and their digital lives.” And Balkam happens to be the founder of the Family Online Safety Institute.
