Why “Power or Powerless”?

I woke up this morning in New York – I’m here for the Webby Awards this evening, and to start the day I tuned into a debate that was happening courtesy of the Birmingham Post, back home in the UK.

The subject was “Power or Powerless” in terms of how digital media is changing and affecting us.

It was interesting to see it happening streamed via Bambuser, discussed on Twitter and liveblogged on the Birmingham Post site and there’s been some good discussion coming out of it

Nick Booth talks about how perhaps we should be looking to the terms ‘useful’ and ‘useless’ rather than focussing on the potential ‘power’ digital tools and media offer us.

Terms like ‘power’ and ‘usefulness’ are in themselves interesting ways to look at what’s happening with ‘digital’.

I guess the big thing that is still always missing from debates like this is the the big ‘why?’.

If you have increased ‘power’ as an individual (or was it as a business? I was confused) then what would you use it for?

And if we’re saying that we’re really interested in ‘usefulness’ (was this really just about entertainment and news as the panel seemed to be suggesting) then what is the thing that we are trying to achieve.

From my end – I was in NYC with a little audio timelag – the debate seemed to be a little unfocussed on these issues, and went off on a few tangents.

I’d like to see a very simple debate run with some other kinds of thinkers, who aren’t necessarily running business that heavily depend on ‘digital’ or ‘media’ as their core activity.

I’m thinking poets, philosophers – people from the cultural sector to give a more human perspective on these issues. Grandparents, people living outside the UK, young people… something a little bit different than the usual mix of ‘digital media industry professionals’.

And a few suggestions for the next event like this:

* Assume a level of knowledge – don’t start from Social Media 101 level at the next event. Let’s get into some gritty details here but not on a geeky technical level and assume people paid attention to this one.

* Keep it on topic. No discussions about micropayments for record companies – that’s not the core issue unless I’ve misunderstood.

* Involve the online audience more and allow for interesting stuff to come out of the online experience. Allow us a more rich online space – perhaps some kind of whiteboard?

* Have a strong outcome – what are we answering and what happens next? What are the URLs to follow afterwards? What is the outcome and what can we expect?

All in – it was nice to see this happening and it’s a shame I was in the states for it, and what’s great is that the Post got so much _right_. I’m hoping there’s more to come.

For me, the outcome was that my question that I posted on the liveblog was ( or perhaps wasn’t – and that’s the point) answered by the panel:

“Digital: Power or Powerless” was the title of this talk. Can each panelist give one example of ‘digital’ that has made us powerless?

The sound suddenly went down for me at that point, but looking at the video and the liveblog it seemed like the only examples that came through were about potentially damaged business models rather than digital media disempowering people. I’d probably take issue with that in terms of how whole economies in the worlds are being run on ‘knowlege’ nowadays, so countries in which the digital revolution is still yet to happen in a widespread way could potentially be seen as being massively disadvantaged. There are also huge issues with language in that having excellent English is the accepted ’starter for ten’ for being at the forefront of a lot of new web technologies. There are more, but it was a shame there wasn’t more discussion around those issues because _that’s_ the debate that’s needed at the moment.

We’ve got the ‘what’ (digital stuff), we seem to have some of the ‘how’ (some of the tools and platforms that use the digital stuff), but there’s no forum to be talking about the ‘why?’ (what are we going to use it for, then? now that we have all this technology freely available what do we want to do with it and why?)

I think there’s an opportunity for an event right there.

So how about it – a BarCamp with a theme of “Why?” Perhaps around the weekend of the large digital event that’s soon to be announced for later this year?