Women in Technology

Hear us Roar

Subject:		MMS? Emerging technology?
Date:		2003-05-04 09:37:07
From:		anonymous2
Response to: MMS? Emerging technology?
I think it's definitely true that there's a shift going on in that kind of messaging, but there are other issues as well. First and foremost, Moveable Type wasn't talked about at all in any of the sessions as far as i can know. Meg Hourihan was brought in to talk about emerging trends and the cutting edge of weblogging but that's about it. And Harold Rheingold has talked a good few times about the power of things like Mobile phones to create 'smart mobs' of people interacting in new and different ways. So I think it's pushing it a bit to say that these kinds of things weren't touched on at all... The other interesting thing about this is that there was a track called social software rather than social technology and I think there's a sense in which they're looking for software-centred differences in social interactions - structure perhaps, rather than hardware. In related commentary, there were a couple of dud papers, and I'm sure that there were people that were rejected that would have been much better in their places. I myself submitted two proposals, both of which were rejected, on two topics very close to my heart - and in the end only got to attend because my boss had to stay in England to deal with the administrators at our company, leaving me a week to write and present his paper... So my presence was more of an accident than anything else...