Gettin' Wiffy With It

The digital creatives met the suits in the two Interactive panels I caught Saturday morning. I was schlepping a lunch of two pieces of biscotti ($3) because all those cutting-edge portable devices I'm supposed to have and carry so that anyone can contact me in any moment of my life are taking up the space in my bag previously allotted for a jar of soy-nut butter and a spoon. I say "supposed to have" because my laptop is a hand-me-down and I just set up its wi-fi, which I like to pronounce as "wiffy"; I am entirely obsolete. In fact, a gawker just walked past me and was heard to exclaim, "Whoa, Windows 98!"

Compare me to the speakers and audience at Podcasting 2.0, such as Chris Pirillo, who seems to have digitized himself entirely. He's not exactly a person anymore. Like the other pro podcasters, he's a brand. He's available in mobilcast and carbon-based formats. I don't think Chris Pirillo carries soy-nut butter around; I think nutritional sustenance is broadcast into his body via satellite, and whatever he's getting makes him really animated. Since the entire talk was a question-and-answer session, everyone got right down to asking how companies can monetize the technology, with a side order of slagging bloggers. The most interesting panelist, Los Angeles-based comedian Laura Swisher, pulled off a good Aquafina joke but was otherwise marginalized.

We Got Naked, Now What? was booked in a unnecessarily cavernous room – everyone else seemed to have run off in search of technology to monetize, perhaps fearful that a new mobile device had been invented during the last session and everyone else's brand was already reaching it. Most everyone in the session was blogging it. Several people in the audience stopped blogging and took exception with the panelists who'd been dooced. Why, they asked, should we be surprised when an employer or a potential employer reads our blogs and fires us? Even if we don't libel or even name our employers, bloggers don't seem to have much latitude in talking about our professional lives. Or any potentially hot-button topics, for that matter, lest we offend. Fortunately Elisa Camahort brought up the issue of corporate loyalty. Are employers really entitled to our brains 24/7, especially since we get relatively little job security in return for our labor these days? Consider the strange case of Elaine Liner. Formerly an adjunct instructor of writing at an unnamed university, Liner was dropped without explanation after years of model performance. A cracking good writer and a columnist at the Dallas Observer, Liner had been blogging anonymously about campus life: the litigious parents, rampant grade inflation, and dysfunctional sons and daughters of the rich. She used no identifying details, but her writing style gave her away, and she was busted. Apparently your boss owns the sound of your voice, too. Beware.