Capturing Ideas Again

It’s eeearly. There aren’t many people in the conference salon yet. They’re playing silly neutral music, people are checking email, munching/drinking a little breakfast, setting up.

Speculating more about Media Minds Meld yesterday afternoon (my earlier post)…

Maybe the WebIQ brainstorming sessions aren’t such a new media thing – brainstorming is a part of old media too, an accepted place for decentralized spontaneity (or so I’m guessing). There isn’t a lot individual-ness in the brainstorming – ideas are anonymous and meant to benefit the group first. The added hierarchy (leaders for each section) reminds me of traditional stuff. Also, they’re going to refine the generated ideas into something coherent – that’s more like producing a newspaper than a blog/wiki/etc.

A new-media-type thing wouldn’t work too well for these purposes, though. They want the end product to be a coherent thing, to make sense and be concise and useful. In my experience, new things don’t usually end up that way – they end up with somewhat uneven quality (ideally, lots of good, some medium), sprawling, but really useful over a long period of time.

Some kind of mix, I guess. New-media ways aren’t best by default, but neither are those old ones.