This is part 4 of a larger blog post, you can read the introduction here.
People do like conferences and summits for the conversation, I’ve personally found it almost of more value than the people I’ve come to hear speak. But really this idea of conversations was brought up in a number of presentations at the Summit. Communicating ideas and new theories as well as data is getting increasingly complex. As the internet and it’s various types of networks start interacting (social, mapping, work, games etc). Twitter/facebook et al have shown there is an appetite for conversation on a global level between people who have no connections other than their love of LOLCats (or GIS either is valid in this context!).
What amuses me most about some people who are anti-social media is the familiar lines of young people having “too short n attention span, nowadays” yet almost in the same breath saying they have “no time for social media”. I think that humans have the same attention span they always did. It’s just we have access to so much more information that we have adapted to absorbing snippets of information from multiple sources. Whilst we scan web pages and social media streams we still manage to read books of more than a few pages (then share that over a social network) and we still watch TV shows of more than 10 minutes for 24 episodes (I wonder what show I could be referring to). It’s not just the entertainment media either, educational programs like those made by Brian Cox or Sir David Attenborough have never been more popular. So the idea of short attention spans of the newer generations is false.
What I think needs to be much more connected is this idea of story telling (via maps for example) and conversations. ESRI for example has an amazing array of tools and systems to tell stories an relay information via maps but no way of enabling that conversation on a global level, except via other people’s social networks. Perhaps we need a new kind of social network that operates like and with existing ones but with an emphasis on sharing data, research and analytical process and tools. I think that this has the beginnings of another blog post about the logical future of ESRI.
NB : I’m aware of the irony of writing one large article then splitting it up for readability….
