SXSW: “This is your tribe,” churches, and idea exchange

I already posted some of my lessons learned from my first SXSW, but I didn’t want to let the moment get away without chronicling my thoughts in general about the experience. I already said I should have done this a long time ago. I should add that I definitely will be back. This is a brain dump, in a way, trying to get at some of the sense of why I just liked being in Austin for this thing.

On the first day I attended a session called “How to rawk SXSW Interactive.” Much of it was fairly run of the mill (wash your hands to avoid the dreaded SXSW SARS, etc.), but one part stood out. They said that the best parts come in conversation, not in panels, and so doing it right means networking. A lot.

“This is your tribe,” one of the panelists said. “This is where you can talk about ideas and projects you’ve got and people won’t get glassy-eyed or want to run away.”

I thought the statement was silly. Tribe? Really?

Really.

I believe in organizations and organizing in general. I believe it’s good to be a part of something bigger than an individual, channeling creative talents and energies into things that serve a good beyond who you are. I’ve been part of a lot of different types of these things in my life: churches, teams, professional organizations, academic societies, clubs, service organizations, and so on. When you’re the type who does affiliation, you invariably have a couple different directions in which to go. You can be a lurker or you can be involved, but both come with a price. If you lurk, you don’t get a chance to tap the potential that comes with relationships from involvement. If you are involved, there is the pressure to conform.

One of the sessions that really got me thinking was Jaron Lanier’s presentation, a riff on his controversial new book “You Are Not A Gadget” that challenges the current orthodoxy as it relates to social media and open culture in Web development. The presentation was great for a lot of reasons, namely that I didn’t agree with everything he said but I was glad to be exposed to it. Lanier is the father of virtual reality and so it’s not like he is some sort of Luddite, yet his book has been heavily critiqued by people who’ve turned the open Web into orthodoxy. In spite of the controversy, though, people of different views showed up, listened, and considered the material. People like me.

Lanier argued that social media actually forces us into individual reductionism. That is, a site like Facebook is an online representation of oneself and you have to fit who you are into categories that Facebook chooses. Fill out (or don’t fill out) the name, age, relationship status, favorite books, and so forth and that is “you.” Add some status updates, or links to things you’re reading, and that adds to the picture. If something is outside of Facebook’s categories, you have a few choices: stay within the system (conform, and be reduced), break out of it by using it in ways that aren’t “intended” (social norms being created in this space every day) or abandon it altogether.

It’s a terrible choice, in some ways. Conform or try to be yourself, the latter of which can have a high cost especially for those who are merging the virtual “you” with the real-life person that they know.

Lanier’s presentation (and based on the first half of it, I highly recommend the book) has me thinking about the nature of heresy. I mentioned my organization involvement earlier to underscore the point I’m about to make: Of all the things I’ve been involved in, I’ve never felt as at home in them as I did at SXSW. The folks there, as it turns out, are my tribe.

I write that knowing it is a bit controversial, especially considering my faith and church involvement. It feels weird to say it. Shouldn’t I feel more at home in a church of like-minded believers than I do at a festival full of technology nerds, especially given that tension between the spiritual and material? I’ve been pondering this one for a few days now, and in some ways (thanks to Lanier) I think I have the beginnings of an answer.

I’m a bit of a troublemaker, I think, to some who know me online. My Facebook wall erupts in all types of arguments over things I post or say in a given day. Some have emailed me to tell me to stop stirring up trouble, and that exasperates me a little. Usually I’m just posting what I’m thinking or reading. It’s not like I am sitting at home trying to manufacture trouble, and yet it seems to naturally follow what I do in these spaces. I decided when I first plunged into social media to make those spaces an attempt to translate an honest representation of myself.

So I get this weird collision on my Facebook wall. My friends who know me in a church context are shocked, sometimes outraged, by my political views or opinions. My academic friends are at times puzzled that I haven’t left the life of spirituality in the pursuit of a science-only view of the world. Facebook, in some ways, is the perfect online representation of my real-world self. It paints a picture of a person who straddles several sometimes-contradictory worlds. Thing is, I’m at peace with it, but the chaos that erupts when my friends from these different worlds collide on my page is anything but. The mad scientist in me loves the chaos of free expression, but the reality is that tempers get hot and feelings get hurt in this social experience of my avatar life. I understand all these worlds in which I live, but I don’t think people in those worlds often understand one another. And in turn, I don’t think people in those worlds understand those other parts of me; where I see a wholly represented self, they live in fragmentation.

There’s a reason why I don’t let my students or fellow Lehigh academics into this space.

Some of what I post and think on Facebook is half-baked. I consider Facebook and Twitter to be something like a sketch pad as I work on deeper understanding. Maybe it’s the academic in me, I don’t know. But I feel like I need a place to play and be free with different ideas. But more than that I crave the feedback because I believe in co-producing ideas as much as possible (what we call “crowd wisdom” in my area of work). I actually believe in this stuff enough to do it.

And yeah, some of it is heresy depending on the discipline I am offending. Mind life is a work in progress. Knowledge is always evolving.

What Lanier presented on Monday flew right in the face of Clay Shirky’s presentation on Sunday, in many ways. But we didn’t have a riot. Lanier wasn’t tarred-and-feathered or told never to come back. One of the pure joys of SXSW is that you’re going to run into divergent views on things. It’s fertilizer for the mind. I can’t express how awesome it is to sit in a session and hear someone say the exact opposite thing you think and have it be OK.

Allow me to talk about this vis a vis churches for a second. I promise there’s a media payoff at the end.

In churches we don’t encourage heresy and in fact move to isolate the heretic. This can come by direct expulsion or from the type of shunning where people don’t associate with you. The problem here is that heresy can take on broad standards in American churches, or at least it has in my own experience. This means that it goes beyond violation of the 2-3 core tenets of the faith and morphs to encompass anyone who believes something that goes against the mainstream.

It happens all the time. Try being a journalist in an evangelical church where people feel the need to complain about the “liberal media” and expect you to care while hearing trite throw-ins of “but you aren’t like that” which only are an invitation to conform to their standard (also, with the weird twist that it’s somehow socially permissible to rip on my profession all the time but nobody else’s; it’s an epidemic). Worse, try being an evangelical who voted for Barack Obama. You face not only the scorn for holding a different belief, but accusations that that belief means you’re automatically judging those who believe the opposite.

It’s a real kick in the head. Try it sometime.

To be sure, there are a lot of things that SXSW and churches have in common. Both bring together people who believe in something similar (a faith vs. interest in interactive media) and both have their norms and orthodoxies. But SXSW is an intellectual exercise that is different than church. There is Q&A where you can ask questions and challenge orthodoxy (committ nerd heresy), and it’s accepted that as a person in the audience you have knowledge and expertise to add to the record. You aren’t a passive recipient of someone else’s view.

In other words, I go to things like SXSW and hear things I disagree with all the time, sometimes things with which I disagree in vehement ways. But it shapes me and sharpens me, and it’s a good exercise for the mind. How often do we as people sit, listen, and actually consider what another is saying? And even when I hear the person I disagree with, I can’t wait to hear more.

I don’t hear this in church; if anything my experience is that a desire to consider something outside the norm leads to a type of intellectual suffocation. Nothing that gets said ever offends me, whether it comes from the clergy or the parish. Within those walls we’re often too dang nice to each other to the point where it becomes the false choice between conformity and disconnection. Yes I’m sketching with a broad brush, but if you are tempted to offer an example or two to the contrary I would caution you to not mistake an outlier for a modus operandi. When’s the last time someone stood up during the pastor’s sermon and offered a countering view?

Life is a struggle. Spirituality is a mystery. It should be a lot messier than we make it.

So if SXSW taught me anything, it’s that if we’re going to define heresy as being something as simple as going against the norm (or standing up and telling the pastor they are wrong), then I want more heresy in church, not less. I want new ideas and views to penetrate those walls. I want a rich and diverse intellectual journey of life and mind, one that comes from being in touch with rich differences. And maybe we keep the old views after the exercise, but maybe we also change a little bit too.

I sketched out the above thoughts in part because I am critical of church culture, but in also part because that kind of culture is exactly what we’re facing in media innovation. When we launched MyMissourian six years ago we faced a lot of the same criticisms. We were heresy, violating an orthodoxy that elevated the journalist to a special place in society. We were trying to destroy the industry.

That battle was hard, but it was hard because we committed heresy but kept yapping until people stopped and listened. We changed our views a little, and some of our academic brethren and sistren changed their views some too. Now citizen journalism is mainstream, the idea of the participating audience is normal. We actually changed the academy a little bit, I hope, because of that struggle, that clash of ideas.

I’m finding that my tribe more and more is located in places where ideas clash. I still am attracted to that basic notion of the marketplace of ideas that Milton first articulated centuries ago. Truth emerges when ideas of all sorts collide and we’re forced to sort it out. The presentation of orthodoxy to the exclusion of all else just leads to intellectual laziness, whereas a robust discussion (and I mean discussion, where we actually listen and consider other views) will eventually lead to the best way.

Am I being too idealistic? I am not sure. Like I said, some of these ideas are sort of half-formed and I’m still trying to figure out everything I have learned.

Cloud compute this with me. Is there something I’m not considering here?