Meg Pickard - Kings Place Festival, 8 September 2011

Editors, Strangers, Robots and Friends
Meg Pickard, Head of Digital Engagement for Guardian News and Media

As well as a wide range of music, the Kings Place Festival includes very interesting spoken word performances.  Presumably as the Guardian occupies a number of floors in the building, various of their staff and journalists were prevailed upon to run a number of sessions on current topics, including the use of social media.  Meg Pickard presented an engaging and articulate analysis of the changes (and challenges) that the development of the Facebooks, Twitters and general blogs and websites out there have posed for the more traditional print media.  She went on to explain how the consumption of news and information has changed almost beyond recognition in the digital age, and how editors, strangers, robots and friends have become the key filters we use to get the information we want from the welter of stuff out there.  Editors point us to the good stuff (as always - but even more critically in this age of information overload).  Strangers can and do easily publish their expertise for our use.  Robots lurk in Google and other search engines, finding what we want through a load of incomprehensible maths.  And friends do what they've always done - point out news, articles, and information they think we would like.

As the sort of person who looks upon Facebook and Twitter open-mouthed with horror, my first reaction was to be gripped with the possibility that I'm allowing a whole new age to pass me by, and that the more time that passes the more impossible I will find it to join in.  This however was followed almost instantaneously by (a) a sense of complete exhaustion at the idea of having to add "doing social media" to my already impossibly long to-do list and (b) the certain knowledge that the "community conversations" I was missing out on were at best OK, and at worst, a load of old drivel.  Phew!  I don't have to take up Facebook and Twitter after all!

But.......dear reader:  the rather delicious irony of using a post on a personal blog to condemn social media to the "mostly drivel" category of things in life isn't lost on me.  What does that say about this and all the other reviews that I've huffed and puffed over?

SB