The Social Hierarchy of SxSW: Retro Thoughts

Flickr Creative Commons: "People Are Funny"

Guest post by @jillfoster who attended her first SXSW last month

The SXSW Interactive conference last month was many things:  a mix of face to face reunions, online relationships going offline for the first time, heavy hitter keynotes, mega parties, marketing soirees, the guacamole(!). It was incredible.  That was my first SXSW.  And good ideas were everywhere — taking shape in impromptu conversations over coffee or in blogger lounges or while sharing the ever-rare outlet to charge the hungry laptop.

Then some comments and observations shared by others made me go “Hmm.”

Increasingly at different SXSW meetups or hallway conversations — comments were made about the social hierarchy of SXSW, kind of akin to David Armano’s Highschool 2.0 reference. The thought leader and various blogger packs “with attitude” that, as some began to note, exuded a clique-ish bent that to those SXSW old timers — contradicted neighborhood feel of the earlier SXSW conferences.

The social human -vs- coffee makers
All these observations have taken a while to bake in my brain.  On the one hand, I appreciate the expressed frustration by some — and that lost sense of intimate community where everyone “is in” at SXSW.  On the other hand, there’s an inner devil’s advocate that says:  SXSW is not the coffee maker conference where there may be hints of variety but in the end, only the same idea drips from every conversation and every type of content.

Instead, SXSW is a humongous interactive and social tech conference — where humanity is at the core. Humanity is at the heart of social technology too.  It’s fascinating and tricky.  Our human psyches feed off of social engagement and its never-ending cycles of seek-exchange-join-recognize (i.e. seek out people, exchange ideas and join with eachother, give and crave recognition, and/or break away to seek something new).  It’s an odd rotating cycle where the exchange of personalities can make certain packs more visible.

I feel like I’m getting long winded here!

All to say, I just wonder how clique-ish SXSW Interactive would be if social tech wasn’t at its core. The human exchange-based dynamic inherent in social tech makes cliques inevitable, some inspiring more positive perceptions than others.

Maybe if SXSW was based on coffee makers always producing, in the end, the same thing it would be different….