Lameness Is In the DNA
Sarah Lacy blows an interview with Zuck, bloggerati/twitterati go crazy.
There are lots of interesting perspectives about this,
like Jarvis's.
I think the heart of the problem is different.
At a conference about radically democratizing media, is it any surprise that, well, a journalist questioning a CEO ended up being a waste of time?
Of course not.
See the irony yet? What happened on stage was a rigid, controlled, 1:1 interaction that's reminiscent of the industrial era.
It's exactly the wrong kind of DNA. Why are we organizing things industrially when we're building things that aren't industrial?
Now, sure. Sarah's interview was (really) lame. Other interviewers might have done a better job. But that's the point of DNA: it makes some outcomes much more likely than others.
I took a
lot of heat for slamming TED's DNA. Take this as another example of the same. Orthodox conferences are nice, but they're not very productive.
Why not? Because their DNA makes productive outcomes are very (very) hard to achieve - because the DNA itself prevents the kind of interactions that lead to cool stuff.
the ideal conference then might no program at all, a bar, rooms large and small, tables and chairs.... something like the village square
i thought there was a half-decent thought on jeff jarvis' post itself:
"...so there was a great opportunity to find out what this audience wanted to know.
How could Lacy have known that? By asking the audience. If I were up there, I’d have blogged a week before asking SXSWers what I should discuss with Zuckerberg. And if things still went sour with my own questions, I’d have opened up the discussion to the floor with the simple question: What do you want to know? "Surely that would have been a step in the right direction....?
