Great article and thanks for the honest feedback. I thought the panelists made some pretty good attempts at answering the question in the title, but also feel that it is a loaded question given that we are still on the bleeding edge of this stuff and that as we discussed a little, each of the vendors has their own angles and conventions. I am looking forward to seeing Phil’s video so I can see what you saw.

Having 3 vendors on the panel and an audience full of marketers and technologists (which is pretty typical for MITX), we thought that it was important to give people, many of whom have not seen much of this stuff before and who do not understand all the possibilities, some activation options. I also talked to audience members just prior to the talk to see what they wanted to get out of it as well.

If you plan to attend an event that I am involved with in the future, I would love your thoughts ahead of time. By the way, I’m happy to see you making recommendations on Whrrl. Keep it up.

I agree that culture needs to progress, but I also think there’s validity in his point that we’ve never had such a “distracting” technology before to give us as much access to that knowledge you reference. This leads to an uncertainty which Carr used as a hypothesis to explore the topic for his book. We’ve only had this thing in earnest for a couple decades, after all.

As for Orson Wells, a prank is a prank (which I’m sure the guys at zug.com would agree with). Wells used the medium available to him at the time. People are fooling us all the time using the Internet. Just ask that Nigerian prince who has all my money.

another side to the discussion:

our exposure to knowledge is vastly superior to our parents generation. surely this counts for something, if nothing more than knowing what we like and what we don’t like. we’re no longer limited to certain kinds of exposure or influenced as much by one persons opinion or act. do you think orson wells’ reading of war of the worlds would have had ANY impact if he did it today? someone would hear it and tweet it, someone else would pick up on it, five minutes later it’s up on snopes.com and sanity prevails. i’ll take that over reading a book any day.

culture, just as everything else, should progress and change. remaining static does nothing for anyone. embrace your limited attention span… it’s evolution