SXSW Kill Your Mouse

I am guessing that I am not the only one who heard the fascinating story on NPR's All Things Considered about the South by Southwest Interactive Festival's panel "Kill Your Mouse" on kinetic computing. You can look at the panel description at http://2008.sxsw.com/interactive/programming/panels_schedule/?action=show&id=IAP060430, more info on the conference at http://sxsw.com/ and hear the NPR story at http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=88154027.

Anyway, it was really fascinating to listen to just a brief synopsis of some of the conversations and panel talks that were taking place at the festival. While not specifically about media literacy, the conversations necessarily connect to literacy, mostly because of the community that participates in the festival. I especially enjoyed the synopsis of the "Kill Your Mouse" panel--about new interfaces that could be the harbingers of the end of the keyboard and the mouse, heralding an era in which our body movements and even brain waves are the connection to the machine. This is already happening with the Wii and the iTouch and iPhone, which react to our movements and touch without the mediation of something like a mouse. Apparently, the panelists did say that the keyboard and mouse are still great technologies that will stay with us, but there was a lot of enthusiasm about the changes that are happening. This topic came up at a meeting I attended recently with some library leaders; basically, we talked about the ethnography of evolution (as they did at the SXSW panel) and the ways in which we as a species are changing both because of technology and how technology is changing and evolving.

Anyway, like I said , this is not directly about literacy but it is about technology and the current conversations and debates about it. I would love to attend the festival, mostly to hear talks by some of my favorite bloggers (Dooce especially--anyone else here read her? isn't she the best?). Reading and hearing about the festival makes me wonder, though, about the ways in which literacies are going to be quite literally (?) embodied in our own bodies by the new physicality demanded by technology. As if literacy won't be just an intellectual interpretive act, but a physical one, akin to interpretive dance or performance art. Or then again, maybe it won't! :-)