Cyberplace: Online in Offline Spaces — and Vice Versa (SXSW)
I saw this panel on Saturday afternoon immediately following Justin Hall’s presentation. Standing room only. It featured a panel including Heath Row of Squidoo, Dennis Crowley of dodgeball.com, Scott Heiferman of meetup.com, Michael Sharon of Socialight, and Molly Steenson who is a former web dev but is now studying architecture. The collective theme was that new social technology can and should enable people to meet up in real world space rather than meet up in a virtual world that exists behind a screen. All of these services are focused, in some way or another, in enabling people to form off-line connections and groups. (Great quote from Scott Heiferman: "We started meetup because it was flipping the bird at the statement that space doesn’t matter anymore…and there is a reason that you are all here in a room sitting on the floor." All of this was very interesting to compare with Justin’s presentation and Joi Ito’s presentation, which advocated using personal information to create your own virtual self as part of a larger virtual game.
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