The Conference

On June 9, 2006, The Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania convened the best minds from a variety of fields to explore the effects of digital links on people’s ability to understand and care about their larger society.

Most internet users know hyperlinks as highlighted words on a web page that take them to certain other sites. But hyperlinks today are quite complex forms of instant connection—for example, tags, API mashups, and RSS feeds. Moreover, media convergence has led to increased instant linking among desktop computers, cell phones, PDAs, MP3 players, digital video recorders, and even billboards.

Through these activities and far more, “links” are becoming the basic forces that relate creative works to one another.  Links nominate what ideas and actors have the right to
be heard and with what priority. Various stakeholders in society recognize the political and economic value of these connections. Governments, corporations, non-profits and individual media users often work to digitally privilege certain ideas over others.

Do links encourage people to see beyond their personal situations and know the broad world in diverse ways? Or, instead, do links encourage people to drill into their own territories and not learn about social concerns that seem irrelevant to their personal interests? What roles do economic and political considerations play in creating links that nudge people in one or the other direction?

We need cross-disciplinary thinking to address these contentious questions, and so our panels included renowned news, entertainment and marketing executives, information architects, bloggers, cartographers, audience analysts, and communication researchers. Audience participation was enthusiastically encouraged.

Thanks to generous support from the Policy Center and The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the conference was able to host over 200 hundred people from around the US and around the world.

A video of the conference proceedings is available for viewing here. At this point, the video is divided by the tapes that were used to record it. In the coming weeks we will be editing it into the particular panel presentations.

The Panels

As the program suggests, each panel grappled with fascinating, important questions relating to links and their impact on the ways people think and talk about their worlds.
For example:

What are the political, economic, and social factors that guide linking in mainstream media firms and among non-mainstream actors such as bloggers, taggers and wikipedians?

What should we expect audiences to know about links? What do they know, what do they want, and what do they need?

What new research approaches are needed to (1) track the various considerations that establish particular media links and not others, (2) map the various directions of knowledge and power that digital connections establish, and (3) understand how people interact with opportunities for connections that call out to them in various media?

How can social and corporate policies encourage diverse audiences to share varied, reliably-sourced ideas so that citizens can together confront their society's past in relation to its future?

Check out conversations about the conference by typing "hyperlinked society" into web and blog search engines.