The Breakdown: In this week’s SXSW Q&A, we talk with Jesse Chan-Norris (@jcn). He’ll be conducting a core conversation – a format intended to be highly interactive - called “Shoebox Full of Photos: Beyond Digital Storage.” He wants to talk with you about preserving personal history, now that we’ve gone digital.

S/G: What can people expect from your core conversation, “Shoebox Full of Photos: Beyond Digital Storage”?

Jesse: First and foremost, I’m looking forward to an actual conversation. I love SXSW for all of the wonderful minds that show up, but so much of the conference is centered around one-way knowledge transfer. The most successful sessions I’ve been to have gotten back to the essence of the conference, which is seeing what happens when you take all of these brainy people and put them all in the same city for four days and see what comes out.

My session will be a conversation around the implications of the entirely digital lifecycle of content today, from creation through production and consumption, and what it means that we never actually generate any physical objects to leave behind. Traditionally, photographs are persistent and they are tangible. A photograph that was made a hundred years ago exists in much the same state today as it did back then. And assuming no disruption, it will continue to look the same for another hundred years. Digital photographs invert both of those properties. By their very nature, digital photographs are temporal, and encoded. They only exist as they are being decoded – without the  decoding machine, a digital photograph does not actually exist. Left on its own, a photograph taken with my phone today will not be viewable in a hundred years.

I’m a technologist, and a photographer, and a storyteller. I’ve been producing content for the web since 1995, and have been producing other digital content for even longer. I’ve been taking digital photos for over a decade, but it’s only really been in the past five years or so that the photographs that I’ve been making exist solely in their digital form. Before that, even digital photos would most likely have been printed to be shared, but the advent of high speed everything and social everything else has made that unnecessary. This, in itself, has been wonderful for the near instantaneous dissemination of information (if a bit overwhelming in terms of volume), but it also means that we are no longer leaving behind this physical trail. I would like to talk about what this means.

S/G: As the records of our personal histories are increasingly digital, our recorded memories seem to become less precious. Why is that, and is it a problem or is it just cultural evolution?

Jesse: I think that there are three factors at play here:

1. Effort to capture. It is so cheap to create digital content that very little effort goes into determining what moments are worthy of being captured in the first place. Pre-digital, when the cost of capturing a moment meant losing the ability to capture another moment later, each photograph required more forethought which subsequently made the moment itself more meaningful.
2. Effort to store. Similarly, digital content takes up very little room and costs virtually nothing to store, so the images we do capture simply get dumped into our digital storage devices with all of the other bits in our lives. Storing these memories takes no effort and we can therefore do so passively, with little consideration for the importance of those moments.
3. Effort to discard. Finally, and possibly most significantly, the effort to actually discard and curate is compounded as more and more photos are captured and stored. Very quickly, the effort required to revisit those histories becomes a burden, and it becomes easier to just ignore them or start over again.

I do think that this is a problem, but not necessarily one that needs to be solved by going back to the way things “used to be.” The problem is that the technology is not serving our memories properly at this point. The reality is that digital memories are cheap, easy and abundant – we need to figure out how to best utilize these properties to better our lives.

S/G: What is it about the shoebox that makes it such a perfect container for photos?

Jesse: For me, it has to do with its size. I have a single shoebox that contains most of the 4×6 photos that I shot in one year of my life. The prints fit perfectly widthwise and there are about a thousand photos in this one box. It’s large enough that I can have a significant body of work – that the photos can inform each other and provide context for each other in a way that a single album may not be be able to, but not so many that it becomes overwhelming. It’s easily pulled out of a closet and put on a coffee table to be explored. Memories remain relevant as they remain accessible, and the shoebox form provides that.

S/G: What recommendations do you have for people who do want to preserve their personal history, digital or otherwise?

Jesse: By saving everything, you run the risk of saving nothing. One of the biggest challenges to preserving your history is to know what to save and what not to save. Save everything and you will ultimately have too much stuff, digital and physical, and you will no longer be able or willing to sift through it all.

So be conscious of what you want to keep. Ironically, I believe that one of the best ways to preserve those in-between items that you don’t really care about, but would like to remember, is to actually store a digital representation of them – simply taking the photo or scanning an item is often enough to allow yourself a moment of memory before discarding that thing you should be letting go of in the first place.

As for digital storage, practically speaking, a mixed strategy of local primary storage, local backups, and backups in the “cloud” is probably the best bet right now. Storing things on remote services is a mixed bag. It is great and can save you in many disasters but you must remember that it is, by its nature, out of your hands, which means that you do not control it and must be conscious of the fact that it could go away at any moment.

S/G: What are you looking forward to seeing at SXSW?

Jesse: I have a few rules for SXSW that have served me well ever since I first attended in 2000.

First, I always try to attend sessions on topics I know nothing about. And I don’t just mean a deeper dive into a topic I have a cursory understanding of, I mean topics about which I know literally nothing. I find that these give me the most bang for my buck and leave me with more questions than answers, which is a great jumping point for when I return to my real life. For example, last year I learned far more about shipping containers than I knew was possible.

Secondly, I am going to try to spend as much time meeting interesting people outside of the sessions as possible. I’ve forged relationships at SXSW that have lasted years and years and it’s one of the reasons I enjoy attending so much.

And finally, I’m very excited to be staying for the music portion of the conference again this year! My company Indaba Music is going to have a presence in Austin again during SXSW Music and I love to watch the turnover as the laptops and iPads get replaced with guitars and fixies. I recommend that any interactive attendee who enjoys live music stay at least a day or two into music – it’s truly a wonderful experience.

Explore the rest of the SXSW 2012 Q&A Series.

The Breakdown: This week we spoke to Ted Rheingold (@tedr), Founding CEO Dogster, Inc. and GM at Say Media. He talked to us about his upcoming SXSW panel (“On the Internet, Everyone Knows You’re a Dog”), online identity, and what dogs like to do online.

S/G: Having a persistent identity online has shifted the way we interact with each other and with content. What do you think are the most significant changes, and where do  you think this is headed?

Ted: The first  shift I’ve seen is that most people now post real (if not idealized) public  versions of themselves on Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+,  etc. Since all these platforms offer OAuth functionality that make it easy to log in to a multitude of other services, people now often default to using their actual public identity on those other new services because it saves clicks. People are becoming more comfortable with not hiding their identity online.

The second major shift I’ve seen is that it is now much harder to be truly anonymous online. In the past, persistent pseudonyms, multiple personas, private Twitter accounts and the like all allowed for a good bit of personally-unidentifiable posting. But today, if the Internet wants to find out the person behind an online identify it usually does.

Where we are heading will only be a temporary transition – as they all are with identity on the Internet – and will be a combination of the following:

• Well-manicured  public personas. Subconsciously or not people are marketing themselves online via their Facebook, LinkedIn, public Twitter, Pinterest, Tumblr, Formspring profiles etc. It’s important to recognize that people are smart enough to refrain from posting things that would embarrass them. People’s online profiles will increasingly become strategically incomplete public personas that represent parts of the person, but definitely not their entire self.
• Persistent pseudonymous  profiles. Many people are also developing alternate profiles not tied to their public personas, allowing them to speak more freely in certain arenas. This won’t be so they can talk about illegal things (which will undoubtedly still continue) – it’s simply so they don’t have to worry that someone doing a Google search will come across information they may not want shared with the masses. It can be as harmless as not wanting an employer to know you’re interviewing or the world to know your new puppy is having housetraining issues.
• An increase in truly obfuscated profiles. In this case, the average web user will never be able to figure out the true identity of the poster. (Though caveat emptor, if the Internet wants to find out who it is, it will). These profiles can be created through services like 4chan, Honestly, Quora, Formspring, Tumblr, and Twitter. Like pseudonymity, this trend won’t be a result of people trying to hide dubious acts, it’s simply because people are getting much more adept at having the ability to share what they want with who they want in the voice they want.
• Trusting of anonymity. Finally, with the rise of pseudonymity and anonymity people will begin to trust the other people using these services almost as much as they trust their family on Facebook. These services will optimize experiences for the most valuable return to each participant and many will find in some cases anonymous is something they can trust more than real names and faces.

S/G: Anonymity has its advantages. What are we at risk of losing with ubiquitous online identities? How can we preserve those benefits while also enabling a more socially connected web?

Ted: I foresee two types of Anonymity rising, each with its own benefits.

There will be the pure anonymity, as experienced today on sites like YouBeMom.com and 4chan, where zero information is requested to post, or demonstrated by the hacktivist communities that allow for anonymous group activities without central authority. This form of anonymity is the same as it’s ever been – it’s easier to facilitate via the web, but doesn’t offer new benefits aside from mass adoption. It’s important to remember that while these groups will never allow for 100% untraceable actions, many will never be exposed. But like I’ve said before, I believe that if people really want to find out who is behind something posted online, they usually do.

I also anticipate a ‘new’ form of anonymity will continue to gain popularity online. I term this “functional anonymity.” Functional anonymity in the real world is nothing new – it’s how most voting systems work. You can only vote if you’re registered with a name and address, but your vote cannot be traced back to you. Online services such as Quora, Honestly, and several blog comment systems are already showing the value of letting people post anonymously if they have already proven their identity. Functional anonymity will create a whole new communication ecosystem allowing for incredible frankness and openness. I anticipate this new form of anonymous expression will be very interesting and contentious as people come to experience it’s benefits and shortcomings.

S/G: What kind of things do dogs tend to do on the Internet?

Ted: The most popular sites for dogs on the Internet are:

• failhumans.com (it’s a knock off of http://faildogs.tumblr.com/ that they
  haven’t been able to code yet because they don’t know how to code.)
• American Association of Meat Producers
• Slutty Puppy
• DogBlogSF (this guy just gets us canines.)
• And of course sniffing virtual butts at Dogster.com

S/G: Who are your other panelists and what do each of them bring to the conversation?

Ted: The goal of our panel is to facilitate a wide-ranging, boundary-pushing, open-ended (hyphen-rich ;) discussion led by the panelists but driven by the audience. All the panelists (Chris Poole, Heather Champ, Rick Webb, Michael Sippey and myself) bring years of first-hand experience in running identity-oriented social software. Flickr, 4Chan, Six Apart, Dogster/Catster, and Barbarian Group have all created community and participatory experiences based upon their own intuition and vision. My goal as moderator is to spring some of the most awkward identity issues from the biggest and small Internet destinations and communication services and see how far back we can unpeel the onion. If the attendees are really engaged and leading a good bit of the conversation I will have done my job properly.

S/G: What are you looking forward to at SXSW?

Ted: It’s become almost trite to say at this point, but SXSW is where the most passionate minds of our generation gather to talk, share, learn and scheme with each other. We all take 3-5 days off of working independently to rub minds for as many hours a day as we can stay awake. I love how at this point you can’t even try and catch every panel you want to see – there are just too many good ones. All you can do is spend as much time as possible in the slipstream of activity around the conference center, party venues and ever obliging bars and cafes, talking about as much as you can with everyone there. Also, SAY’s going to be throwing a really great party. [Editor's note: Check out the line-up from SAY Media's SXSW 2011 party and keep an eye out for announcements on their blog.]

Explore the rest of the SXSW 2012 Q&A Series.

The Breakdown: To kick off our third year of the SXSW Q&A series, we caught up with Peter Meyers (@petermeyers) about his talk, “Making eBooks Smarter: Responsive Page Design” and the future of eBooks.

S/G: Interest in eBooks has been growing like crazy since the eReader/tablet explosion, and a lot of people are talking about what to do and what not to do. What can people expect to hear at your talk that they won’t hear anywhere else?

Peter: “Making eBooks Smarter” is the session’s title, but what it’s really about is making ebooks that make people smarter. I’ll look at the two big tasks everyone engages in when they read—memory and interpretation—and ask: how can digital publications improve reading comprehension? I think of it as customer service meets instructional design meets publishing.

S/G: We love books, and we love digital, but for very different reasons. What makes you feel that ‘the book’ is still a useful metaphor for digital?

Peter: The question makes me think about the music industry and how terms like “album” and “record”, while still common, seem antiquated in a digital world where singles dominate. But the book, whether delivered digitally or in print, feels to me like a much more durable format. Namely, as a vehicle for the extended, considered thinking of an author.

That said, I do tend to think of the “app” as the book’s successor. In the same way that TV didn’t replace radio, I think apps, for certain kinds of content and certain kinds of subject matter, will prove to be a better form for an author to entertain and inform her audience. (Heck, I could probably write a whole ’nother answer on why we should probably start thinking about authors as collectives, rather than working-in-a-garret solo operators.)

S/G: Who’s doing eBooks right? What are some great examples you’ve seen?

Peter: My list of current faves goes like this:

• Wreck This App. A creative sketchbook app loaded up with prompts to get your creative juices flowing (“Pretend you’re doodling on the back of an envelope while on the phone”) and a built-in palette of painting tools. The author’s spirit is encouraging and the digital canvas accommodates the kind of mistake-friendly experimentation that I don’t think you get with print.
• Welcome to Pine Point. A web-based scrapbook which tells the history of a Canadian mining town that thrived for a few years and then was shut down and abandoned. Wonderful example of how to integrate, and not just add, lotsa media elements (audio, slideshows, animations, video). Immersive and linear too, even as all the various multimedia doodads play out onscreen.
• The Magic of Reality. Lovely, innovative design ideas in this iPad app, including figures that remain on the canvas as readers scroll multiple panes of text past horizontally (enabling them to appreciate a visual that’s relevant to more than just one page of text). The book also has a very useful, three-tier bookwide-navigation system. Page layout and typography are efficient and unobtrusive. Interactive graphics like Newton’s Canon simulator are powerful examples of how onscreen teaching can be both illuminating and fun to play with.
• Amazon. I have to include these guys on any “best of” list. They’re a bugaboo to many in the publishing world, but for my money their Kindle apps demonstrate an attention to the reading experience that many others neglect. Administrative chrome is hidden and little details like doing without the faux-book edges that until recently gunked up the iBooks app are signs that someone over there gets the importance of immersiveness.

S/G: We noticed that Modernist Cuisine (@ModernCuisine) is following you on Twitter. That’s a stunning set of 5 huge books with mind-blowing photography. How do you take a unique experience like flipping through those gorgeous pages and transform it into a digital experience?

Peter: I cashed in all of my last year’s gift-getting chits (birthday, Hanukah, anniversary) and corralled a consortium of gift-givers to band together and get me this thing. Stunning, indeed! I’ve erected a shrine for (to?) it in our dining room. At BookExpo America 2011 I spent some time talking to the MC folks about their thoughts on a digital edition. They were pretty adamantly against it. And while I don’t think anyone can argue with the breathtaking results of their print production, I do think they’re missing an opportunity by sticking with pulp only. The short version of my advice to them would be: don’t publish a digital edition of the whole multi-volume set. Instead, distill out an app that’s highly focused on handling some of the in-the-kitchen reference chores and computational wonkery that any modernist chef has to perform.

S/G: You’ve got a book on this topic coming out later this year – Breaking the Page: Transforming Books and the Reading Experience. Who’s the target audience for this book and what do you hope they’ll get out of it?

Peter: Early on–2012, say–I think writers, editors, book designers, and publishers will be its core audience. Everyone, in other words, trying to grapple with books in a touchscreen era.  But beyond that timeframe I think the touchscreen publishing revolution is going mainstream. So, in addition to professional publishing types, anyone who needs to create documents bound for a tablet or smartphone is going to be interested in thinking about how to do things like integrate video alongside text or incorporate gestures like the pinch and tap as part of the reading experience. That includes a pretty long list of folks who currently still compose for print: students, teachers, financial analysts, menu designers, newsletter publishers….the list is endless. Breaking the Page is my attempt to catalog all the various content designs that are available and help people new to this stuff decide what to use and, just as important, what to avoid.

S/G: What are you looking forward to seeing at SXSW?

Peter: So many good sessions, it’s hard to pick! Here are four that are on my must-get-to list:

• Creating The Code: A BBC Transmedia Documentary – A behind-the-scenes look at building a transmedia production, centered on the story of a professor’s search for a “mysterious code that governs our world through numbers, shapes and patterns.” How can that not be a fun session? BBC teamed up with “next generation” storytelling firm Six to Start on this project. I just know this one’s gonna be entertaining and informative.
• The Present of Print: Paper’s Persistence – An ode to what oftentimes is still my favorite medium: print. This panel “celebrates the present of print, and focuses on emerging print-digital hybrids”. Reminds me of a neat-o example I saw the other day, GameChanger, an iPad app where the user situates the device on top of a cardboard game (think: Monopoly) and then bops back and forth between the app and the board game. Here’s a video demo.
• Rise of Analytics: Impacting the Editorial Process? – A look at how to use behavioral analytics to “guide the editor on how to deliver digital and mobile content but also offer new insights on how to deliver traditional, offline content to improve the readers’ overall experience with the brand.” Sounds geeky, which sounds great to me.
• Storytelling Beyond Words: New Forms of Journalism – This panel is about using digital tools like interactive graphics to help journalists tell better stories. The teaser that really caught my eye: “Instead of sending users to a separate link for a video, why not embed video into the story at strategic points?” Yes!

Explore the rest of the SXSW 2012 Q&A Series.