If a random visitor walked past the Malmo Slagthuset a couple of weeks ago, they would have witnessed an unusual sight: dozens of men and women in 1900s era striped bathing costumes and boaters, scurrying around and shepherding crowds of people into large lecture halls.
These were the volunteers for , a two-day gathering of over 40 speakers and 900 attendees who were there to discuss, debate, and predict where the future of media and technology are headed.
Media Evolution is a non-profit organization that operates as a "neutral platform in the centre of rapid changes", facilitating new business models, products, and services that arise out of the increasingly frequent shifts in the media and technology industries.
This year’s annual conference was organized around three key themes: Human Behavior, New Technology, and Making It Happen.
Speakers were slotted into blocks addressing each of those themes, but it soon became clear that a unifying thread ran through many of the presentations: the increasing centrality and importance of collaboration, both online and off.
During her introduction to the Collaborative Innovation session, Google’s Caroline McCarthy noted: "The lesson learned by pretty much everything I’ve heard this week is that humans are inherently collaborative. They will find a way to collaborate no matter what you put on the table."
McCarthy explained that thanks to the myriad digital tools at our disposal, capitalising on collaborative efforts is easier than ever before, and the results of that collaborative action producing some major changes in the way that people and businesses operate.
One such shift is the rise of collaborative consumption, the redefinition of traditional offline economic behavior (such as trading, bartering, renting, and swapping) through the use of peer-to-peer (P2P) technology.
Dubbed one of the
Collaborative consumption is a hot topic. Session curator Lauren Anderson asserted that, as an economic and cultural movement, it had the same transformative potential as the industrial revolution.
And she might not be far off: this month in The Atlantic magazine, Derek Thompson and Jacob Weissman discussed the significant implications of : millenials who, for a variety of economic, practical, and environmental reasons, just aren’t as interested in owning big ticket items (such as houses and cars) anymore.
Vinay Gupta, one of the session speakers, understands this shift first hand. Gupta and his business partner Tom Wright realized that while cars were often the second most valuable assets that people owned, they were also the most inefficiently utilized: in the UK, the average car is used 4.6 hours a week.
In order to help users diminish their car’s 'idling capacity', Gupta and Wright launched WhipCar, a P2P car sharing service that has been a runaway hit. Not only are there 19,000+ cars listed on the site across the UK, but members are now grouping together to decide what car to collectively buy and share next.
Bonding together to achieve a common goal - economically motivated or not - was a frequent theme throughout other presentations as well.
Researcher and ethnographer Tricia Wang illustrated how the problem of childhood hunger in China was being combated through a combination of local and national coordination, from the efforts of volunteer corruption monitors to digitally-enabled donations from individuals.
Keynote speaker Hojun Song explained how the 'collaborative intelligence' from a range of individuals - from artists to passionate amateurs - was helping to realise the launch of the world’s first open-source satellite.
The capability of social media and digital technologies to facilitate and encourage mass action is nothing new.
What the Media Evolution Conference made abundantly clear, however, was that the collaboration demonstrated in these case studies will soon be the rule, and not the exception.
This is a scary prospect for many brands, whose entire business models are based upon many individuals making repeated purchases.
But we now live in a world of Kickstarter and Spotify, where users can decide what goods they want and how they want them.
This is only the tip of the iceberg, and the companies and brands who understand that now will be the ones who win in the future.