You Are Not in Control – #RIMC 2012 Highlights
The ninth annualRIMC(Reykjavik Internet Marketing Conference) took place March 9. Theannual conference, which takes place in Icelands capital,is organized byKristjan Mar Hauksson, SES speaker, SEMPO board director, and founder ofNordic eMarketing.
Here's a wrapup of some of the highlights from RIMC 2012.
The morning welcome was delivered by the President of Iceland. Without slides and in a very relaxed tone, the president talked us through his personal experiences of new media; in particular about how instrumental social media had been as a tool for the people of Iceland to organize and protest after the fall of the banks in 2008.
Prior to the Arab Spring, the people of Iceland had used Facebook and Twitter to petition the government to reject various referenda. President lafur had quickly tuned in to the power of social media, and the ability for him to use such platforms to speak directly to the Icelandic electorate and for the past 18 months has rejected traditional media and global news appearances (on broadcasters such as CNN, Fox, and Reuters), in favor of social media.
President lafurs speech was quite emotive, certainly inspirational, and helped set the theme for the day, which was You are Not in Control. In this perspective the point was that technology has been a genuine and powerful tool for social change; facilitating democratic movement, greater and more personalized communication, plus mass organization and collaboration. It was clear that for President lafur that social media has helped to remove control from the hands of the few powerful leaders and media owners.
The President of Iceland opens the conference (Image Credit: Jackie Hole)
I was interested to see Pariser's keynote; having read the book "The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You" a few months ago. The book and Parisers talk concerns personalized behavioral algorithms and the inherent dangers of content and behavioral clustering, in how this can lead to ring-fenced views of the world.
Pariser first began to see the most tangible effects of this personalization around the time of the last U.S. elections. Up to a certain point Pariser had seen content shared by people in his Facebook network that represented their own varying left and right-wing interests.
Over time the algorithms at play had learned through Parisers own re-shares, likes and interactions of his own political leanings; then suddenly and close to election time he was presented only with the content that matched his own political preferences. Thus being a completely one-sided view of content from his network. Thinking about this to its logical conclusions Pariser noted a number of concerns with this method of filtering content.
See the original post here:
You Are Not in Control – #RIMC 2012 Highlights