The joys and perils of oversharing at NXNE

Colin Schultz, contributor

(Image: Les Ongles by Clement Deneux)

?The medium is the message.?? When Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan coined the phrase in 1964, the society-changing media he was writing about were things like electric lights and televisions - things that have radically changed the way in which we interact with one another.

Nowadays, the developments that influence society most strongly have to be digital tools, a fact that became increasingly apparent as I drifted from event to event at the North by Northeast (NXNE) festival this week. Fittingly, the festival takes place in downtown Toronto, Canada, just a brisk walk from the University of Toronto campus where McLuhan did the bulk of his work.

Similar to its sister act, South by Southwest in Austin, Texas, NXNE is a week-long festival featuring hundreds of bands, dozens of films, and a conference on emerging media and technology. And so far, NXNE has demonstrated the effects of what may be the world's most important new media: cheap video recording, and social media.

At their most basic, these changes were brought to the fore in Tuesday's screening of the finalists in this year's Disposable Film Festival. Founded in 2007 by Carlton Evans and Eric Slatkin, the festival was a response to a digital camera that was ?so inexpensive that it was literally disposable,? said Evans.

This year's winner, Clement Deneux's short horror film Les Ongles, was shot entirely on an iPhone. Though it relied entirely on stock footage, my personal favourite was Penny Lane's ode to love, The Voyagers. It tells the story of Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan, and their influence on the sounds and data sent on the golden records aboard NASA?s Voyager probes as a message to extraterrestrial life forms. The increasingly pervasive access to cheap cameras or video editing equipment, combined with free ways to upload your work, is causing a sea change in film.

?The fact that everyone has a camera on them all the time now really changes things,? said Evans. ?It gives them the opportunity to share their stories in ways they wouldn't have been able to before.?

(Image: The Voyagers by Penny Lane)

Former war-zone journalist turned political satirist Saman Arbabi showed a more serious side to these opportunities to share in his talk, My Anti is Bigger than Your Censorship on Thursday afternoon. While thoroughly entertaining, he still managed to get across the importance of social sharing and cheap video by demonstrating its role in helping to change a nation.

Dubbed the ?Jon Stewart of Iran,? Arbabi's show, Parazit, takes a darkly-humorous look at Iranian events. During the country's 2009 election protests, said Arbabi, ?the only way to communicate with Iranians was through the internet; YouTube and Facebook played a major role.?

To make Parazit, Arbabi and co-host Kambiz Hosseini repackage video from people inside Iran. According to Arbabi, the Iranian government ?have complete control over the media: radio, television, and print.? In response, they set up a ?hidden website? where people could download the show, copies of which were then shared through Bluetooth or as burned DVDs.

?The internet has brought the world closer together,? said Arbabi. ?As long as people feel close to each other, there will be less dictators in the future.?

To Marshall McLuhan, however, each medium brings with it both positives and negatives, or in his terms, extensions and amputations, of society's abilities. And, true to form, both the potential pleasant and unpleasant consequences of the ability to share at will were vividly on display at NXNE.

During an early-morning discussion on whether Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other social portals are driving or reflecting a societal shift towards narcissism, some of the panel members, filling lulls in their own opportunities to talk, took self-portraits with their phones using the audience members as a backdrop. Where Disposable Film Festival founder Evans sees an opportunity for aspiring film-makers to create something personal and unique, self-described influencers discussed the ins and outs of building themselves into personalised advertising vessels, or working with those who have.

One of the panellists, Hal Niedzviecki, who wrote a 2009 book on what he described as the rise of ?peep culture? said that ?more and more, people want to exchange their privacy for rewards. That reward could be friendship, community, attention, free product.?

The way in which this medium influences the way we interact may be the most fundamental of all. ?In the end,? said Niedzviecki, ?we get to a place where we don't see each other as human beings any more, we just see each other as brands.?

NXNE runs until Sunday in Toronto, Canada

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