Sarah Lacy’s controversial interview with Mark Zuckerberg during the SXSW technology/music conference has been broadly measured out in the media. Today, the journalist retaliates in BusinessWeek.
In a two-page online article Lacy said that the negative response to the interview has been ‘overdone’. She went on to point out that the (in many cases highly critical) comments were the result of the lack of real other news at the conference. “There was no breakout company at this year’s SXSW. If there had been, and if there were more innovation on the Web in general, there would have been a lot more for reporters and bloggers to write about than the style of questioning in the Zuckerberg interview”, Lacy writes.
She also pointed out that the match business and tech (as personified by the Lacy Zuckerberg performance) was possibly premature or ill placed. Reason? Techies are interested first and foremost in code, not in business deals, Lacy says. “SXSW is still largely focused on the tech side. Attendees wanted Zuckerberg to talk code, not business strategy—API, not IPO.” Perhaps she has a point.
“Twitter is as socially transformative as blogging. My experience aside (many Twitter users were not kind), this is breakthrough technology,” she added. That is something that most of Lacy’s fiercest critics likely can’t disagree with. Jeff Jarvis underscored this on Buzzmachine earlier this week. He points out that Lacy is both an accelerator of and a victim to this. Most of the Twitter comments, after all, were tweeted as and when the interview was taking place and totally unawares to Lacy. “Oh, if only there’d been a back-channel chat projected on the screen beside her. Then, she could have seen”, Jarvis writes. That’s undeniable. Technology might be at its eeriest when it collides with human consciousness. But the cure to this is to make the tech visible (that way, it’s no longer pure consciousness, therefore less eery).
Lacy has it absolutely right when she says that “Twitter was the breakout site of last year’s SXSW. This year it proved why.” No doubt next year the social side will be beyond misunderstandings. But the techies gotta work it.