Are you ready to live your life on-line?
SXSW Multimedia Fest looks toward a future of existing in cyperspace
By Harley Jebens DALLAS MORNING NEWS
DATE: March 7, 1996
PUBLICATION: Austin American-Statesman (TX)
EDITION: Final
SECTION: XL Ent
PAGE: 21
"When people can shop on-line with less headache than using a credit card in a mall, they will,'' says Paco Xander Nathan. "When people can work on-line with less headache than commuting to an office, they will.''
Nathan has an appreciation for those subjects. As the owner of a computer media company, many of his transactions are conducted on-line. And he "telecommutes'' to work when he puts time in on one of his company's engineering and design contracts.
He's talking about the concept of "living on-line,'' and what systems need to be in place before more people truly will start "living on-line,'' and what the phrase "living on-line'' really means anyway.
Scholar Henry Mills also is talking about living on-line. "For my purposes, the Internet, at this time, is about information,'' he says. "But some of the questions that the notion of `living on-line' raises are: How does (living on-line) relate to our understanding of humanity? How does our consciousness of ourselves and our community change as more and more of our time (and lives) are spent on-line? How will this serve humanity, and how will it disturb humanity?''
Cultural critic Mark Dery also has thoughts on the subject. "The luminous dream of "living on-line' is shadowed by the increasingly Darwinian reality of life off-line,'' he says. Life off-line, he says, is characterized for many by cities that are falling apart, an unraveling sense of community and "a gnawing anxiety about the widening chasm between the wired elite and the minimum-wage masses.''
Nonetheless, technology evangelist Ted Kircher asserts that, "Post-2000, almost everyone's time and life and living will be in cyberspace for economic, social and entertainment purposes since that will increasingly become the norm in each area.''
Nathan, Mills, Kircher and Dery will meet, some of them for the first time face-to-face, to discuss this idea, this notion of "living on-line,'' and what its implications are to us as a society and as individuals. Their dialogue will be just part of the third South by Southwest Multimedia Festival, which runs Sunday through Tuesday at the Austin Convention Center. But it'sa dialogue that should touch on everything that the festival is about ideas and questions and connectivity and business deals and opportunities lost and, oh, yeah, the future.
Born three years ago out of a desire to draw attention to Austin's burgeoning multimedia community multimedia referring to the convergence of the world of technology (computers and the Internet) with that of the arts (film, music and animation) the SXSW fest has grown to become a confluence of business and artistic impulses, of academic and futuristic interests, of technological tools and far-reaching visions. And it continues to grow.
In 1994, multimedia was but one track in the SXSW Film Festival's schedule. Last year, it broke out into a festival of its own and attracted more than 1,000 attendees.
Festival organizer Dewey Winburne put together a CD-ROM souvenir of last year's festival, which includes short video clips of tours to HumanCode and Virtual Studio, keynote speeches by musician Todd Rundgren and Origin's Richard Garriott and a list of all the issues discussed and the panelists who discussed them. The CD-ROM, which will go out to all of this year's attendees, encapsulates what went on at last year's fest and conveys the upbeat vibe that last year's conference exuded the feeling that "the skies are the limit'' and "the potentials are unlimited.''
UNCERTAIN TIMES
In 1996, the skies might be a little darker, and the pontentials clouded by such frustrating realities as trying to make money with multimedia or the Internet, by the blindness of government officials to "the social implications of living (and doing business) on-line'' and by the uncertainties of an industry that seems to change almost daily. If nothing else, such uncertainties will provide an edge to the conversations at SXSW Multimedia '96.
Winburne and fellow festival organizer Hugh Forrest certainly are expecting things to top last year's conference. For one thing, the festival has moved from the Hyatt Regency Hotel to the more spacious Austin Convention Center SXSW Central where the film and music conferences also will take place. For another, the conference has expanded from last year's three-day affair to four days in 1996.
Things kick off on Saturday when more than 25 Austin multimedia businesses throw open their doors to conference attendees, with Cortex Communications, Alternate Audio, Go-Go Studio and the American Institute of Learning among the open-house participants.
The action shifts to the Convention Center on Sunday through Tuesday. There, the conference's playroom will feature "the latest breakthrough technologies,'' while the Internet Theatre will offer guided tours of World Wide Web sites and on-line technology. Among the speakers at the conference: Hal Josephson, former director of worldwide business development for videogame 3DO; Entertainment Weekly's Ty Burr; the University of Texas' Marcos Novak; and author Bruce Sterling. Amoung the topics that will be discussed: "Telecom Reform: How it changes the Internet," "Legal issues: liscensing copyrights, labor issues, key deal points and other important matters," "The Web is dead? Multimedia's next fiv years," "Virtual Reality"...
And, of coruse, 11the social implications of living on-line (subtitled 'More connected or more confined?')
MOBILE HOMES
One of those implications is a severing of the tie between where people work and where they live, says Kircher. Soon enough, people will be able to telecommute in to work from almost anywhere in the world, and thus will be able to live anywhere they want.
"While people and their companies will become more mobile,'' Kircher says, "governments (as we know them today) are inherently immobile.Hence, governments had better start viewing themselves like `motels,'i.e., how do they attract and retain their customers (their citizens)?'' If governments make poor investments, Kircher says, if they provide services that are of little use to their citizens such as light rail service, which telecommuterswill find no need for and thus will resent paying taxes for then those governments are increasing the chances of those citizens, particularly those in the "mobile higher-income brackets,'' fleeing to an area whose government provides what they feel are more valuable services.
There are people who take that notion of separation even farther. In his book "Escape Velocity,'' Dery points out people who believe that the digital age predicates the separation of the mind from the body. Dery's book describes, among other residents of the fringes of computer culture, people who view the body itself as obsolete and foresee downloading their very consciousnesses onto computers.
"There is no denying that growing numbers of us are spending ever-greater amounts of our lives on-line,'' Dery says. "In a sense, 'netizens' are gradually being `Borged' transformed, metaphorically speaking, into human-machine hybrids through the 'extensive infiltration of microcircuit fibers into (our) surrounding tissue,' as a character on 'Star Trek: the Next Generation' put it. The trick is to savor the info-vertigo of cyberspace while remembering the meat of the matter: the economic inequity, environmental depredation and other social ills that we forget, to our peril, while high on sci-fi rhetoric about life on-line.''
Mills uses the Internet for academic research, to communicate with other scholars and to publicize the work of Walker Percy. He says he's excited by the possibilities of the Internet that it allows everyone a chance to be creative and collaborate with everyone else, which he says, "can eventually lead to an infinite chain of words and concepts.''
DANGER AHEAD
But the Internet and living on-line hold certain dangers. "We're a consumeristic society, in that we define ourselves according to what we do, according to our material possessions,'' Mills says. "The . ... Part of the attraction of the Web is its novelty factor: You never know what's out there.
The issue of identity in the age of the Internet is something that Fringeware's Nathan also touches on. ``On-line relationships tend to differ (from their real-life counterparts) due to the twin `gotchas' ofliquid identity and the lack of the obvious,'' he says. "People can almost pretend to be whomever they please via a Net personality.
"The flip side is that you don't really get to learn much about a person at least not the important details, which are generally obvious yet left unspoken. (On-line friends or business relations) could keep e-mailing for years, but even though (they) live and/or work within blocks (of each other), could pass on the street as strangers,'' he says.
Whether it's the nature of on-line identity, government responsiveness in an era where everyone lives on-line or the difference between real life and life on-line, Dery, Nathan, Mills and Kircher have plenty of thoughts about "the social implications of living on-line.'' Theirs will be just one of many conversations when the SXSW Multimedia Conference comes to the Austin Convention Center this weekend.
*Paco Xander Nathan: Studied at West Point and Stanford and worked at Bell Labs, NASA and Motorola before founding FringeWare, an Austin-based company that publishes the magazine Fringe Ware Review,a retail store at 51st and Duval streets in Austin.
*Henry Mills: Organized the Walker Percy World Wide Web site , a font of information on the Southern writer, containing resources on Percy for everyone from the academic researcher to the curious passer-by.
*Mark Dery: Has written for Wired, The New York Times, Rolling Stone and a host of other magazines and has just come out with his book, "Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century,'' a look at "fringe computer culture.''
*Ted Kircher: Worked at development labratories at IBM until he retired in 1992, going on to found Information Age Consulting, with a mission to ``exploit technology for society.''
South By Southwest Multimedia 96
When: Saturday through Tuesday
Where: Austin Convention Center