By Sam Court, experience design director, The White Agency
Firstly, before unpacking all the acronyms, and to help set the scene, check out this simple but brilliant comic from The Oatmeal. As Homer famously said, “It’s funny cos it’s true”.
FOMO
In 2014, The White Agency sent some of our senior staff to SXSW. The guys seemed to have an amazing time and came back all inspired. Of particular interest to the agency was the concept of “Scenius” - a term coined by Brian Eno, and recycled by Austin Kleon at SXSW, about updating the myth of the lone genius to be more communal and collaborative. Check out Austin’s keynote where he asks a lot of questions about “saving” SXSW itself.
Off the back of this inspiration, we continued to forge ahead, making our processes at White as inclusive and collaborative as possible. And whilst it felt nice to have a name for what we were doing, this was really something that had been happening organically at the agency over a number of years leading up to 2014.
OBIWTGTFH
Last year, I was excited to attend SXSW myself. Like many, I spent a lot of energy trying to maximise my time in Austin - I wanted the maximum exposure to inspiration. Initially, however, I was pretty disappointed. The whole thing just seemed like a massive sales pitch, filled with Bullshit Bingo buzzwords. By the end of the first day, I couldn’t wait for it to be over so I could get off the silly amusement park-esque ride, and go visit my mates in San Francisco, before returning to the simple life in Sydney. My brutally honest review of the event can still be found on White’s blog.
JOMO (or Joy of Missing Out)
After the dust had settled and I’d accumulated a few agency and client conversations about my experience at SXSW, I found my “double rainbow” and wrote a more positive reframing on what I’d learned.
In order to write that piece, I’d realised that by March 2016, when all the SXSW hype was going to be floating around again, that I would be experiencing pure JOMO. And that’s right where I am now. I mean, have a look at a couple of the tired summaries that have come back from both major publishers and individuals alike:
Yes, yes, we get it: VR is a really exciting thing. It’s cool and it’s immersive. I’m not unexcited about ‘consuming experiences’ in that format. But at the moment, it’s also pretty weird seeing people ‘plugged in’ and completely oblivious to the physical world their bodies are inhabiting. That photo of ‘The Zuck’ at MWC, which was like some dystopian mashup of The Matrix & 1984, is still giving me nightmares.
Time to take a chill pill
Whilst all the shiny things at SXSW are bound to capture everyone’s attention, I think the industry needs to calm down and take stock. The reality is that things actually haven’t progressed as much as we we’d like to think they have since the ‘70s, and the techno-crazed crowd that love to frequent SXSW need a bit of a reminder.
In his recent book “The Rise and Fall of American Growth”, the economist Robert Gordon uses masses of data (not ‘big data’) to articulate why the digital revolution isn’t as important as the five key inventions that powered growth over the 100 years before 1970: electricity, sanitation, chemicals/pharmaceuticals, the combustion engine, and modern communication.
Innovations like these brought about big changes in society and how it functioned. Sure, we experienced some of this at the end of the ‘90s and early ‘00s, but there’s been nothing truly substantial since, demonstrating to me that the main impact of the digital revolution has already happened and that it just wasn’t as big as we thought it was going to be.
The reality for our future is that the living standards in the developed world are likely to stay stagnant, because as Gordon points out, the effects of slowing technological progress will be reinforced by a series of “headwinds” such as rising inequality, a plateau in education levels and an aging population.
However, as a society we’ve come to expect constant technological progress and that’s why realities such as this are often overlooked in favour of the shiny, theme-park experience of an event such as SXSW. Don’t get me wrong, I do understand the importance of recognising and celebrating advancement and innovation in our industry, I just have no desire to do it in the crazy, chaotic forum that SXSW has become.
Sam Court
Experience design director
The White Agency