As I prepare to pry myself away from the migas and huevos rancheros down here in Austin, I have to get to work on my greatest hits list from SXSW. After all, as a self-respecting DC-resident, how could I be caught returning from a trip without some coherent talking points?

Before I get to the substance, I should note that we quickly discovered that the real action here at SXSW happens out on the town at the swank after-parties. Once you actually talk to the other folks here, you start to realize how the group's diversity might be at the root of what pulls people back here each year. From big names to mere dabblers, this conference attracts a unique mix of designers, social entrepreneurs, web developers, bloggers, politicos, consultants, businesspeople, sociologists, and the occasional pro activist. (The common thread is that everyone's a geek at heart.)

Lots of interesting data was presented and exchanged here, but the Danah Boyd panel, mentioned in my earlier post, still really peaks for me as the most memorable and useful. Boyd and her fellow panelists led us through a simple exercise designed to shift the way we think about "expressive technology," or all of the social tools we use these days, from blogging communities, email listservs, photo sharing sites, multiplayer games, and even mobile community tools.

Our task was simple: pass personal information on through a network of strangers. First, we all shared a secret with someone else in the room who we didn't already know. Then we took the other person's secret on as if it were our own and found someone else in the room with whom we could exchange secrets. After 10 or 15 minutes of secret sharing, we wrote our final secret on a big green sticker and put them on our backs and walked around reading everyone's secrets.

It was a pretty crazy experience, taking exchanges that are normally invisible and making them visible. I found myself having to take personal ownership for words or statements that weren't true for me, which was difficult at first but then became a fun game. Some of the secrets I had to pass on as my own: "i have webbed feet", "i've stolen aderol from my children"; "i'm gay"; "i'm pregnant"; "i had a crush on my best friend's fiance before they got married." Other secrets floating around the room: "i hate macs";"i'm in love with the person i came to the conference with"; "I sell drugs"

Despite the fact that it was more interesting and memorable than listening to someone lecture, this experiment allowed us to role-play in physical space some of the dynamics that we normally experience online in virtual spaces. We were forced to explore notions of trust and the boundaries of modifiable environments, just as we do (albeit less consciously) when we post personal information to profile pages on social networking sites, stories to our blogs, or photos to our flickr accounts. The majority of us don't normally post secrets, per se, to those places, but we do post personal information.

Boyd's synthesis of these tensions is more to the point: We spend a lot of time in the digital world looking at each other without knowing who's looking at us, or when, or how often. As designers, community builders, and even as online citizens, we need to consider a number of different factors when we design these collaborative interfaces and spaces online:

1. network of strangers :: size? boundaries?
2. levels of intimacy and first impressions :: how close or local will people get?
3. beyond social norms :: how will we interact and socialize?
4. discovering commonalities :: opportunities for play?

Why is all of this so interesting to me? We seem to spend so much time thinking about the functionality and aesthetics and user experience and purpose of all these different tools, websites, and technology that we rarely ever consider their impact on individuals or society. Check out Boyd's blog, her research, or her posts on Many to Many, for more of this sort of thing.

UPDATE (3/21/06): Check out the video highlights from this panel (downloads a QT file). Or see all video coverage from SXSS.