Everybody goes to SXSW to see The Next Big Thing. We go to interactive to discover the next Twitter. We go to music to hear the next Arcade Fire. We go to film to see the next Hurt Locker.
SXSW is two weeks we spend trying to look into the future, but my favorite two hours at SXSW 2011 were spent looking into the past.
30,000 years into the past.
Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams is a 3-D film that documents a rare look inside the Chauvet caves of Southern France — home to the oldest known cave paintings on Earth. I was lucky enough to catch the SXSW Film premiere. As a person who spends the majority of his time making marks to create meaning, it was impossible for me to take in those ancient paintings and not become emotional thinking about the way marks can last, the way they can travel through time and connect human beings.
Cut to one week ago. I was sitting in a bar with my friend Lee LeFever, the co-creator of Common Craft, a company that makes explanation videos “in plain English.” We were talking about the web and the common misconception that it is something ephemeral, something that is not permanent, something that doesn’t last. Lee told me that the most-watched, most-popular videos on the Common Craft site are videos that they posted in 2007. Videos about technology that are four years old, people still watch them and share them with friends, because the content is still strong and still valuable. As Rob Walker wrote in an article about the popular podcast Radiolab, “[sometimes] the value of a media product does not come from being fast. It comes from being timeless.”
“The most permanent medium is the digital one.” That’s something that Benjamin Palmer, CEO of The Barbarian Group, said in a recent interview. (When I think about the Chauvet caves, I’m reminded of the double meaning of “digital” expounded by cartoonist Lynda Barry: “This may be the digital age, but our hands are the original digital devices.”)
It’s easy in this industry to get caught up chasing after The Next Big Thing. Let’s not forget to also chase after The Thing That Lasts.