Kathy Sierra Teaches "Human-ness" at SXSW
Kathy Sierra took her theme of passionate users to the next level at SXSW Interactive. Specifically, Sierra posed this question: Why do people go in person to a presentation that's being blogged live, twittered, and videotaped? Why are we all here?
Context & Ripple Effects
Kathy Sierra built her reputation on the 'passionate users' thesis — that products win by making users better at something — and brought it to SXSW Interactive in March 2007 with an uncomfortable twist: she asked the audience why any of them were physically present when every session was being blogged, twittered, and videotaped in real time. It landed in a hall already saturated with that dynamic; the same weekend's Writing, Better panel distilled seven years of blogging craft into lessons for a crowd that treated live conference coverage as routine.
First-order effects
- Speakers such as Sierra can no longer treat the room as their only audience — a talk now competes with its own real-time transcript, so the delivered content alone no longer justifies the trip.
- SXSW Interactive's organizers are left holding Sierra's question as a pricing problem: paid attendance is set against free, instant coverage of the identical material.
Second-order effects
- Backchannel tools like Twitter gain their showcase venue at gatherings like SXSW, making the live commentary layer part of the event's product whether organizers plan for it or not.
- Panel formats aimed at practitioners — like the blogging-craft sessions running alongside Sierra's talk — face pressure to deliver interaction and critique that a blog post cannot replicate.
Third-order effects
- If information transfer stops being the reason to gather, conferences reprice around access to people — hallways, Q&A, peer networks — rather than sessions, restructuring ticket economics across the industry.
The trend: Real-time web coverage is turning conference talks from scarce content into abundant commodities, pushing the value of events toward in-person access that cannot be streamed.