*You know, this offhand speech of mine – truly a rant, delivered from notes – is provoking a remarkable response specifically BECAUSE there is no crisp digital record of exactly what I was saying. People are just, you know, creatively riffing about what they thought I might have said. Sorta.
*I myself don't know exactly what I said at SXSW, because I was too busy eating taco chips at the podium to take shorthand on my own remarks. But mostly it was about losing old forms of personal sociality through deploying new forms of electronic sociality. As McLuhan said, (and I hate to quote the guy,) every mediated extension is also a mutilation.
*This speech got mutilated. And as it wriggles around on its bloody stumps, it's provoking more reaction that the speech itself would have done.
I find myself hoping that *there is no record of this speech,* that it simply vaporizes forever. Then it would be like one of the party conversations people used to have at my house. Before people blogged everything.
*I don't mind being blamed for people's stark emotional reactions to hearsay remarks I likely never made; I'm a novelist, I'm pretty used to that.
http://badatsports.com/2009/searching-for-bruce-sterling/
"So what does this all mean? Heck if I know. But I do find it incredibly ironic and stupid and maybe brilliant–but maybe not so much–that Sterling gave this talked-about talk at one of the biggest freaking INTERACTIVE conferences in the country, he’s one of the cultural cognoscenti whose opinion, on certain issues anyway, drives the discourse forward. He puts ideas on people’s agendas, makes writers like Heffernan rethink their assumptions and publicly question them, etc.
But I can’t even find audio or video of his talk anywhere online that would allow me to form my *own* opinion about what he said firsthand (well, a recording would make it sorta second-hand, but you know what I mean). As a result I’m forced to depend on other people’s truncated versions, reliable though they may at first appear. Maybe SXSW will eventually post a podcast of Sterling’s 2009 talk, although the conference took place over a month ago, which is an eternity in internet time. Even I probably won’t care about it anymore by the time they post it. Who knows, maybe Sterling didn’t want to give them permission to reproduce his talk in the first place, in an effort to preserve some semblance of ‘the old days’ of which he is said to have spoken. From live talk to magazine editorializing to blogger’s notes to Tweets…social networking isn’t worth much if all it comes down to is gossip. I want access to the real stuff, not just everyone’s opinion, commentary and tweets about it. In other words, if anyone finds a link to Sterling’s speech at the 2009 SXSW Interactive conference, please let me know! Thank you..."
