For devotees of the social media conference circuit the medium is clearly the message…

From 9 – 11 June I spent my waking hours at the O’Reilly conference, Graphing Social Patterns East, in Washington DC. Lots of senior developer types from Facebook, Google and Myspace and the like presenting to a fairly geeky audience. As someone whose interest in social media is heavily skewed towards small businesses and commerce, I was a little disappointed that neither term was actually mentioned over the three days!

Content aside, what stood out from the opening minutes was the collective audience behaviour. As panellists talked, the audience went about its business: maintaining profiles on the social network of choice, tweeting like no tomorrow, and I kid you not, listening to iPods whilst updating Facebook. In short, we weren’t listening. For those with an interest in the conference proceedings, this was often enjoyed as a mediated experience. Following the GSP East Twitter Feed, or reading live blogging coverage from one of our fellow attendees took precedence over actually sitting back and digesting what the people just a few metres away were saying.

(With an absence of irony, the conference organisers did request on day 1 that mobiles were turned off less they disturb the sessions!)

What did I take away from this experience?

1. For those in the social networking biz, the tools of the trade seem to be at least as important as the content – in other words, the medium trumps the message. This is nothing new to Web 2.0 though: Nietzsche reflecting on how his writing style had changed since using a typewriter said “our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.” Well that explains Twitter then …

2. The views of others take precedence over a personal and original standpoint – it’s easier and faster to consume another person’s perspective than think about something yourself for the first time (This point was drilled home to me by the UGC videos introducing each session, which were practically all derivative riffs on other people’s work).

So it appears to me that we may be suffering from a Web 2.0 induced attention deficit disorder. Quite a worry really.