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There are an estimated 7.4 billion people on the planet. With so many
people navigating the world in so many different ways, our desire to
share our experiences has never been more prolific. With the Internet
becoming the universal mind for modern society, tapping into this col-
lective conscious is as easy as creating a profile or an account.
This connectedness allows us to form and maintain relationships through
an invisible force residing in our laptops, tablets, phones and watches.
All the answers to your random curiosities can be found just as fast as
they pop into your head. Seek and you shall find. Ask and you shall re-
ceive. Thoughts, ideas and experiences can conceivably be shared with
everyone you've ever known as they are happening!
How did we get here? Did the drive to socially connect push the evolution
of smartphones and wearables or was it the technology that brought
forth this thirst for information and spearheaded the social media rev-
olution?
South By Southwest Interactive launched in 1994 as new media and tech-
nologies began to emerge. Although the exact nature of how multimedia
was going to impact life as we know it was obscure at the time, there was
a shared sense of excitement for what was going to come next.
DIGITAL CULTURE'S
COMING OF AGE
The Fertile Grounds of SXSW & the
Flowering Collective Conscious
