The Panel is Dead

Rusty Stahl, Executive Director of EPIP, and Trista Harris, Executive Director of the Headwaters Foundation for Justice, put a call out for potential next gen bloggers and kindly included me. I thought that I'd take notes and post my thoughts during the breaks or in the evenings.

Silly Kevin. That's how people blogged in the Stone Age, in like, oh, 2006 maybe. These days, you've got to be a media empire of one. Arriving at the EPIP pre-conference, several folks came armed with laptops, digital cameras and recorders, the whole shebang.

I was a little overwhelmed. Here I am thinking, "I've joined the new media!" only to discover I'm publishing a zine. Remember those?

But do you know who I really feel bad for? The panelists.

Dear Panelists, Blackberries, laptops, and digital video aside, your audience is paying attention. It's just also grabbing photos, typing out what it thinks about what you just said, reading what that guy three rows back just said about what you just said, and responding for their Twitter followers and the whole Internet to see. By the way, when you're done, you have 16 new Facebook Friend requests. Don't ignore them.

The conversation used to be between the panelists. It's not even in the room anymore.

Of course, if the panelists weren't in the room to begin with, we wouldn't have them and their opinions to blog about - which is another way of saying:

The Panel is dead. Long live the Panel!