Mark Little opens the summit. Alongside, his "Mastermind" chairs await their expert occupants

Everyone will have their own view, but for me one of the keys to this event was that it somehow managed to keep its feet on the ground. Just when it threatened to spin off into the realms of new-media-head group-think, some bright spark would chip in to say: “hang on a minute…” The warmest applause of the day came for the speaker who said ” it ain’t necessarily so”, albeit without questioning the fact that new media matter deeply.  It’s just that they are NOT the beginning and the end, life without end, amen.

Speaking personally, I had a great day. I twittered like a maniac, spreading the bon mots of my fellow panelists. (A selection of other twitterers here.) Maybe this was good – I was on the constant alert for some pithy soundbite (therefore attentive) – but maybe it was bad – I felt strangely guilty when some last-minute questioner (and self-confessed social media innocent) questioned whether “all these people twittering haven’t somehow lost contact with reality – just being where they are…”. I remain ambivalent. Instinctively, I realized I was closer to this heretic ( I wanted to tell him that I go days without twittering, honest!) than to others who said they felt somehow incomplete if they weren’t online, people who said, without visible irony, that they were REALLY in more than one place at the same time and a speaker who quoted, straight-faced I think, the youth-savant Charlieissocoollike to the effect that it was weird that anyone might consider the online and offline worlds as two separate things. Charlieissocoollike, sorry, but you need to meet some actual, like, people, or take a holiday in a place without wifi or even GSM reception. (Yes, they exist.)

Look, I don’t want to harp on, but like-minded individuals tend to form self-referential groups and, at times, get a little overexcited. New media are fab, really, but they are not going to solve the world’s problems, even if I am open to the idea that they might radically change the world.  The internet itself changed the world, no question, but when push comes to shove we’ve still got to wash our socks, right?

We should enjoy this time, make the most of the amazing possibilities we are lucky enough to have, but without forgetting that the internet is there for us, not we for it.

Annoyingly, the hero of the web summit was Ben Hammersley. He is the editor of Wired magazine (UK), therefore, as he himself had it, “supposedly the most digital person on the planet”. I say “annoyingly” because, well, Ben Hammersley was annoying. He had his act down to a fine art: being the uber-digital digital iconoclast. He made abundant fun of web-heads, more or less telling them to get a life, stop obsessing over their aggregated twitter feeds, interactive blogs and RSS news channels and go down the pub and TALK TO SOMEBODY. Thing is, just when you were getting geared up to totally have it in for this guy for, erm, fouling his own doorstep, he went all dopey and said something like this was the “golden age of information, and that he couldn’t think of a single area of life where things had ever objectively been better. So the smart-arse iconoclasm diffused by a dose of rampant. doe-eyed idealism! Spot on. And deeply annoying of course. I imagine, should he read this, that he will be deeply gratified. As he should be, because he is right: we should enjoy this time, make the most of the amazing possibilities we are lucky enough to have, but without forgetting that the internet is there for us, not we for it.

But don’t let me give the impression that this was all some philosophical debate about the internet: it was mostly about learning how social media can work for you. The format of the day was the panel discussion, led by the amazingly professional RTE newsman Mark Little, of sonorous voice and easy manner (it was a joy and a fascination to see him in action), whereby groups of “experts“, including the undersigned, were encouraged to share their experiences and wisdom. There was some guff about “seeding 150 ideas during the day”. I wasn’t counting, but there was indeed plenty to chew on, most of which was twittered to the wider world in real time.

For me, one very small moment said a lot about how this social web thing is changing the way information circulates. The twittering brigade were marking their tweets with the hash tag “#dws” (Dublin web summit). For those who daren’t ask (like me a few months ago), that means that you mark your short messages with a label (#dws) which allows users of Twitter to search for and view all the tweets thus marked and therefore in practice follow everything on that subject). Anyway, at one point, some guy sitting in Canada tweets a question along the lines of: “hey guys, what’s #dws, it sounds really interesting?”. I tweeted a quick response enlightening him and received his thanks.

So there was a guy in Canada – one of many, it seems – following the summit, absorbing the pearls of wisdom and basically, I suppose, being in two places at once. Amazing, isn’t it? But maybe he should have been down the pub instead…

Elderly people on computer

If I look to my family – I find we are all on the web, but doing different things there. We are all there for daily news, seeking for the most interesting title. OK, not all of us – the youngest one (7 years old) is not interested in news yet and the oldest one – 84 years old grandma -prefers one special TV news programme, because “the moderator is the son of my sister’s friend’s friend.” My nephew is on the web to socialize. He is one of the so called “mobile generation” and is my guide into WAP. My mother uses the web for research and goes to Youtube for classic music. She is the one who is ready to pay for good content. And she does. On the contrary, my father is on the web for everything he can get for free. He always says that this is the best thing about internet. That is the reason he tries tirelessly but unsuccessfully to teach his old mother to read her regional press printed out from the web. A pity she has a problem with her eyesight, otherwise he would try to convince my granny to sit and read these stories online. Although my dad has made some progress. My granny has been on skype for me for a few weeks already…

New media has changed my habits of media consuming. But that’s not surprising.

Myself, I am still not so advanced as to be on Twitter or to use all multimedia features possible, but I’m happy to watch Youtube documentaries, mostly those made by the BBC. Whenever I want and whenever I have some burning question. The last one I was pleased to find and watch was “Michael Jackson Story 1958-2009″, also powered by the BBC.

Youtube is always there for you – with both lots of amateurism and most important, lots of valuable information. So, no regrets that I do not have my real paper magazine in my mailbox anymore.

She chose traditional media

The different supports – press, radio, TV, internet have different uses and meanings according to different temporal and spatial contexts. Is it the same effect when we read an article in a newspaper, when we hear a radio programme about it, when we watch a television programme or we read a blog in the internet? We can consider that there are some differences. Not only in different uses of it (your hearing is more activated in one case, your vision – in another; you need to make a gesture when you turn the newspaper’s pages and it is enough to click when you read in internet). It also depends on differences between the associations that these media have.  

From my personal point of view, these associations are constructed socially but also depend on personal experience. For me, the ‘traditional’ media could not be replaced by www. Why? I remember my grandparents’ summer house where at an exact hour my grand father turned on the radio (national Lithuanian radio) and started listening to the news. It was like a sacred hour, something ritualized that had, and still has, a meaning for my grandparents. My parents watch the news on national television in 8.30 pm every day and I could not imagine that they could replace it by the articles on the internet. As you can see, even the medium can have a special meaning for people.

I also have some special feelings according to different media. For example, pleasures of reading a ‘real’ newspaper (and smelling this new paper) that I don’t feel when I am using the internet. Maybe it is because while reading newspapers or magazines, I concentrate on it more, but I have also a feeling of being in a ‘real’ world. For example, I have my coffee on a ‘terasse’ on a sunny day with a newspaper. Or I take the new Elle magazine with me to the beach; I read magazines on trains or books in a bed. I am in this world.

Even if we stay open-minded, we need some benchmarks and sometimes it is difficult to reach them in a virtual space.

Am I in the same world when I go online? Of course I am. But the problem lies in the associationsof this huge informational machine.  I feel as if I am in a different space with lots of information that you need to…manage somehow. My anxiety is about the ability to concentrate when you read something in the internet. Sometimes I have a feeling that I read all the day different things on the internet but I can’t remember any essential thing. It’s a paradox but when you read an article in a bus or on the beach, you hear people talking, laughing, but as a result you are more focused than when you read on the internet. Maybe it is because this kind of information from ‘traditional’ media is a finished product? Something framed that gives you a certain feeling of security? I would like to use a “house” metaphor. We need to frame our space of living; I think it is the same for thinking. Even if we stay open-minded, we need some benchmarks and sometimes it is difficult to reach them in a virtual space.

Whereas sometimes I have a feeling that I lose control in the internet, that the information controls me and it is difficult to reach  stability there. It is true that what you find in the internet, you could not find in any ‘real’ newspaper. What is new is that you can quickly compare information you read: this article says this, another interprets the same facts differently; in this magazine you can feel more this ideology… While reading one ‘real’ newspaper or listening to one radio could be dangerous because you have only one image of life. But…how to choose your own manner to consume this huge (‘new’ or ‘old’) world of media?