Two interesting things from a NYT article about SXSW and media:

it was obvious after a few days here that the people formerly known as the audience were too busy making content to consume much of it, unless it came from their friends. The medium is not the message; the messages are the media.

I’m very interested in this point – the (supposed) decline of the audience with the expansion of authorship, or, perhaps, the idea that everyone in the audience is now an author. That there is no separation between authors and audience members any more. And, even more importantly, this:

One participant [in a panel called “Sex Lives of the Microfamous”] said he had some very firm boundaries. If a first date goes well, and he is interested in seeing the person again, he sets out the rules of engagement.

“You can blog about me or you can date me, but you can’t do both,” he said to audible approval.

Exactly. You can’t do both. Same theme: the idea that you can’t simultaneously be experiencing and documenting something, whether that something is a person or a concert. A warning, a ultimatum, a cautionary note.

Unless, that is, the documentation is part of the experience. Somehow, I think that most people who consider themselves to be writers (bloggers, authors, humans) have already come to terms with this idea, the pillaging of experience for expression. But I, dissatisfied, am still circling it like a block in West Hollywood. I do not know where to park the car of my writing in the neighborhood of this idea. I am afraid of getting some kind of a ticket. There is a Denise Duhamel poem – but I’ll make it a separate post –