Laura Moorhead / Robert Fabricant / Jeff Bonforte / Andrew Blum / Eliot Van Buskirk / Rafael (Yahoo!, worked on Pipes) / Rogas (Editor-In-Chief, Endgadget)

Rogas: Technology is driving a lot of social change in our society. Democritizing media, but also changing how we interact with others and understand ourselves. The idea of always being connected by the device in our pocket changes the way we think of ourselves relating to society.
Blum: When you compare how quickly technology has changed compared to say, cities, the change is pretty striking.

Fabricant: Social position is started to be reflected by how people are shown in social mediums. People’s sense of social security has been affected as a result. Trying to confirm through their networks their place in society.

Van Buskirk: Widgets are doing to the web what the web did to society. Lots of splintering and loss of place.

Q: How is place changing?

Blum: Check plazes. Geographic social networking.

Rogas: People have a different sense of privacy than they did even five or ten years ago. Being very relevatory about one’s life online is very comfortable to many young people. Staying private doesn’t make sense to them. “I don’t want to feel old when I don’t blog about everything I do.” Kids are constantly negotiating a private and public sense.

Fabricant: Exact same trend in business world, just represented differently. (Checking of email, IM at work, how available people are to other people.) Kind of an idea of uber-self or super-self.

Van Buskirk: While users are stealing data from companies, they’re doing the same to us. Collecting data.

Q: With the entire generation going online, is there gonig to be a new generation that goes the opposite direction?
Rogas: If there is a backlash, we may not know about it, as they won’t be blogging about it.

Van Buskirk: May seem more cliques, you only get the address of the network if you’ve met someone.

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Rogas: Mfg tend to freak out too much over people hacking and modifying their devices. By allowing it, though, you make yourself seem more consumer friendly.

Van Buskirk: Still waiting for a larger commitment to customization from larger companies. Business are kind of hooked on that, but still want their products to be disposable.

Rogas: iphone will be a closed platform that people won’t be able to change. Goes against trend towards adaptability and innovation.

VanBuskirk: Apple will miss out if they don’t open up the platform.

Rafael: Need more openess from providers as well. Apple needed to push a closed device to get carrier support. Offering hackable devices on a mobile network could give more business to mobile providers.

VanBuskirk: Social trends happenign with computers can’t happen with mobile devices because vendors control everything.

Rogas: We’re going to have to get to another generation of wireless networks before we see something like that.

Q: What are population or demographic trends that are going to influence social and tech.

Blum: Baby boomers having lots of children with big TVs, cable cards, and video cameras. All the infrastrucutre is all there for videoconfrencing.

Audience question: How long for internation trends to trickle down to US?

Blum: Look at how long it took restrictions on carbon emissions to get here.

Van Buskirk: As countries realize they can make money by not havign everything locked and DRMd, we’ll see more coming from other countries in coming years.