Social media allowed reality to intrude on talks about past

WIRED:Austin's interactive conference was full of hopefuls looking to be the next Twitter

I HAVE spent the week at South by SouthWest, or SXSWi, the sprawling music, movie and interactive annual conference in the Texas capital, Austin.

The interactive side these days is pretty much websites and apps and games. In fact, from a purely random sample of the conversations in the hallways here, you’d conclude that everybody here was intent on being the new fun social website – the next Twitter.

This is where the micro- blogging service launched in 2007 and, in its wake, a thousand start-ups are here seeking to emulate its success with leaflets and demos in every hallway.

These people pay SXSW Interactive’s ticket prices, fork over the exhibition costs and fill Austin’s hotels. Me, I come to SXSW to find out what might happen in the very near future or more often to struggle to understand what just happened.

As a consequence, this year, I ended up bending the ear of activists from the Middle East and journalists from Al Jazeera and America’s NPR and the New York Times, trying comprehend what we had all seen in Tunisia and Egypt and are still seeing in Libya and Bahrain.

When the rest of the conference turned its collective attention to those topics, it ended up freezing it in the past. Did the Egyptian uprising really depend on Facebook? Did Tunisia take its cue from WikiLeaks? The consensus here, should you wish to know, was “not really” and “not according to anyone actually from Tunisia”.

The world though doesn’t wait on SXSW’s opinion or stick to its schedule. Away from the limelight, the uprisings in north Africa continue apace, and not always for the best.

In a discussion about social media, Andy Carvin, who, as “acarvin” on Twitter, was one of the trusted conduits that the American public received summaries of messages from Egypt and beyond, received rumours over Twitter that an Al Jazeera cameraman, Ali Hassan Al Jaber, had been killed in Libya.

Sitting on one side of Carvin was Al Jazeera English’s new media journalist Ahemed Shihab-Eldin.

And so, while discussing how news can spread and be confirmed via social media, we all found ourselves corroborating and establishing the death of a colleague using exactly those tools.

I have grown sadly accustomed to doing this in front of my laptop, but watching the expressions of rising shock and concern on other faces was far more disorienting.

Reality kept finding a way of intruding into SXSW.

I sat while a audience member at a SXSW keynote announced that Flickr, the photography site owned by Yahoo, had a few hours earlier deleted hundreds of photographs uploaded by an Egyptian blogger and activist, Hossam el-Hamalawy, from its site.

El-Hamalawy was a “pro”-user of the service and had been using Flickr to display images taken from DVDs he found at the Egyptian protesters’ raid of the State Security building.

The DVDs were labelled “The Agency Officers’ Archive”.

El-Hamalawy suspected they were pictures of officers in the notorious organisation, whose record of wrongful imprisonment and torture are decades long.

Flickr’s automatic message to el-Hamalawy told him, inexplicably, that the pictures had been removed because of “copyright infringement”.

Calls to Yahoo!’s human rights team established that copyright infringement had nothing to do with the case.

The real reason was a combination of other users’ images of complaints and a technical violation of Flickr’s community guidelines, which say that Flickr photographs must be the work of the account owner.

In the meantime, El-Hamalawy’s emotions had proceeded from terror that the pictures that disappeared from his account due to hacking by opponents, to outrage that one of those “revolutionary” social sites on which he depended was throwing him out without back-ups of his careful tagging or recourse against the decision.

The Egyptian journalist’s struggles and anger were distant from the comfortable discussions in these air-conditioned Texan rooms.

Other battles came from closer to home. Even as SXSW’s poster child Twitter sponsored panels on how its tool could be used for the greater good, it was embroiled in a legal fight to prevent it having to hand over private subscriber details to a United States grand jury over prosecutions being considered regarding the WikiLeaks website.

The three Twitter users involved were defended by Twitter’s own lawyers, as well as the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union.

On Sunday, the union co-sponsored a SXSW party, partnered with Google.

Coinciding with the first day of SXSW, their fight to protect the details was rejected by the court.

I commiserated with the lawyers at their party, then stood by the bar with my free drink and my smartphone, reading my own Twitter stream as it lurched from drunken SXSW partying to the grim new details of the disaster in Japan and on-the-ground reports of attacks on protesters in Bahrain.

Unaware that I was no one, a trail of hopefuls came up and struck up their best party pitches. Sweetly, almost subtly, they enthused about their start-ups.

It’s true, I thought: almost everyone here does want to be the new Twitter or Flickr. I nodded through their plans and thought about the power they might gather if they achieved their dreams and the endless, dreadful ramifications of all their eager mistakes.