And the audience takes over....

Building on what happened at the We-think event last week you may have seen that the audience took over when Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook CEO, was interviewed last Sunday at the South by Southwest Interactive festival – see here for what happened. An interesting follow up post here by Steven Berlin on the best way to gauge the tone in a room without technology is to crack a few jokes. 

Comments

[Tessy Britton]

Reading the accounts you posted Roland makes me think less about mass collaboration, or collective intelligence . . . and more about mass pressurising.

Hard to imagine this could be a positive use of technology.

[Roland Harwood]

Hi Tessy,

Quite right and a good example of the dumbness of crowds:

http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2007/01/the_dumbness_of.html

I think the example at South by Southwest Interactive is not positive but there must be a good way by which technology can augment audience participation in a positive way, moving away from the teacher and pupil format of most events.

Bottom up systems still need structure and leadership else they usually decend into chaos, however it's a different kind of structure and leadership to the one most of us are used to.