Last night was my first Ignite event ever, I went with pretty high hopes which were for their part, met then redefined. Sometime last year I started thinking about what it means to live in this culture so largely defined by 140 characters or less; something I call High Frequency blogging. Everything is done in fractions of a moment and even that is cumbersome, unwieldly. I reckon this all started back in the 90′s with what was then cultural cutting edge: speed dating; now a clumsy lumbering dinosaur on the tech-waste landscape. We sort of look at it and think my god, is it hungry? it looks so….mostly dead.
Last nights’ event startled me inasmuch that 5 minutes is the new keynote, Ignite has created the Mexican Standoff of conferences, if your not done in 5 minutes you will get gunned down. Watching speakers time thier speaking bits with the 15 second slide quota was interesting, especially if they spoke faster than thier slide presented. There is no room allowed for absorption, digestion….we simply arent given the time to chew through the fat. I simply wasnt given the time.
Maybe everyone else there got it and Im just getting old; I walked in the room with one of my moleskines, ready to take web adresses, @’s and anything else I could jot down mid-speech but guess what: I was the only one; I was absolutely fucking archaic with my…..paper and writing tool? I knew there wouldnt be time to take notes of any consequence, but I dont need notes of consequence, I need my own encrusted coding in my own encrusted pages for later review and consideration.
Last night was the very beating heart of the high frequency beast. I didnt walk out of the arena, sold on the idea, I did walk out of the arena at halftime however. The format is good, and clearly alot of people …in this case 500 plus, enjoy the process but for me, it wasnt the right fit, the right moment. There is something vastly engaging about paper, tools and hand-craft. I take literal translation and sheer joy out of the phrase, (in this year 2010…so very obviously the future we dreamed of as children) “dumbing it down”. Anymore dumbing down means the feel of paper against your hand, the stain of ink against the back of your palm and the strains of time, in the case of our now future: that strain can be defined as anything lasting over an hour or depending on your arena: 5 minutes.

If your interested in digging, here is the tag: #is10