The Silent Uprising

There has been a lot of talk lately about the recent Mark Zuckerberg (of Facebook fame) interview at the SXSW conference.  Audience members, who felt that Sarah Lacy handled the interview poorly, began to call out for an open Q&A session.  Tired of Lacy's interviewing style, the audience protested and ultimately got its way.  The interesting part of the story, though, isn't the audience reaction—it's the technology that led up to it.  At last year's SXSW conference, a social coordination tool called Twitter was introduced.

Traditional etiquette dictates that audience members remain relatively quiet while attending an event out of respect for the presenters.  In the pre-Web-2.0 world, this meant that apart from a quick note to your neighbor, nobody shared ideas until after the event had ended.  The new web has changed that, though; the Zuckerberg uprising was build of the collective feedback of the audience through Twitter.  A few discontented listeners in the back row began complaining online, other responded, and before long the crowd had coordinated a protest without speaking a word.

There's no question that user-generated content is changing our world.  Now we just wait to see how.