Drinks were had, a microphone was produced and I began to chat with Dave Thackeray. A few minutes later Jon Carmichael was pulled into the mix and I got him to reshare one of my highlights of the #TDC22. The story of how he got to create ‘one of histories most amazing photos’.
There was a party on the banks of the River Tyne in Gateshead. The afterparty for Thinking Digital. The finale for all that had come before and a celebration of it’s success.
Herb Kim, Emma Turnbull and the team had done it again. Another wonderful curation and delivery of a fantastic tech based event. An international meeting of the most curious souls, all descending on the North East of England with open hearts and minds.
For many, this is a yearly pilgrimage, but having been deprived the last two years we were back with an appetite for connection. An aching to re-immerse ourselves back into the finest curiosity cult in physical space. A collective of geeks, nerds and devs. Futurists, academics and researchers. Techies, hackers, designers and consultants. Even some normal folk. A wonderfully eclectic gathering I feel very much at home with.
We got together. We learned about design thinking, fintech, blockchain, VR, the social web, astronomy, robotics, psychology, education, whisky and so much more.
Ten years ago in a blog post about Thinking Digital, I shared how my body and mind had been ‘invigorated to exhaustion’. This year, this antidote to ‘remote’ was the same.
I feel we are still on the cusp of so much. Technology is best when it brings people together and these physical spaces, where we can share and learn, enable us to collaborate and converse in a much higher resolution than any screen can offer.
Also back in 2012 I mentioned that the subtle combination of body language and expression was still undigitizeable. This year, even though a computational social scientist will have us think the algorithms know us intimately, the context is missing and a guess is as good as it gets.
So for now, intimacy and our thoughts still belong to us. Apart from when we come to Thinking Digital, a hive of learning, sharing and collaboration. Where intimacy and thoughts are shared freely with like minds.
Here is a link to a Twitter thread from TDC22
Here is a link to the #TDC22 tagged tweets.
Thanks for listening and/or reading.
I have more audio for supporting subscribers of this email in the pipes. The sporadic email I post to Documentally.net is free. The archive, all content and access to the other channels is available to all supporting subscribers of this dispatch for the small cost of £4/month or £55/year (That’s $5/m $69/y).
Thanks in advance for supporting my endeavours. If you take out a supporting subscription and would like three free months to NordVPN let me know and I will send you a voucher.
For those that like to think ahead, registration for Thinking Digital is open for 2023.
Thank you to Jon Carmichael for chatting with me. Please go check out his work.
For the audio geeks, I recorded the above audio on the Sennheiser Hand Mic Digital (Amazon Affiliate link just incase you are flush). It plugs straight into the iPhone and so I can’t monitor the audio but as you can hear the limiter handles drunken raised voices pretty well. It also does a decent job of isolating background noise. The audio was recorded into VRP7 and I left it unedited apart from a few seconds of when (an even drunker than us) guy shouted a rude word into the mic. It didn’t really add anything and he did ask for it to be removed.
Please share this with to anyone you think might appreciate it.
I’m @Documentally on Twitter. I consult and run workshops on content creation and narrative strategy. Feel free to reply to this email if you would like to know more.
See you on the web, in the back channels, next year at #TDC23 or in Egypt on the August 2nd 2027 for the total solar eclipse.
Cheers!
Christian.
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