SXSW and the Segregation of Baseball

Richard Hershberger

Richard Hershberger is a paralegal working in Maryland. When he isn't doing whatever it is that paralegals do, or taking his daughters to Girl Scouts, he is dedicated to the collection and analysis of useless and unremunerative information.

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3 Responses

  1. Chris says:

    SXSW hasn’t been just a music festival since 1994, when it added film. It added “Multimedia” a year or two later, and that was renamed “Interactive” in ’99 or ’00. Interactive is a huge internet/technology conference, with pretty much every major tech industry player in the world (including gaming from every side) pouring money into it. It’s where Twitter was effectively launched (Twitter existed before SXSW, but that’s where it was announced to the world), to give you an idea of how influential it is.

    It is the most mainstream and corporate of the three components of the festival (I have never paid to attend, but hang out there because there’s music without the larger crowds and a lot of really nice free stuff; lots and lots of free stuff). All the TV networks are there, the major players in internet technology, computers, anyone who’s ever built an app ever, and so on. The entire thing is a basically promotion platform. It’s for that reason it has tended to avoid controversy like the plague.That it was doing a harassment in gaming session at all was mildly out of character; that it bailed at the first sign of discord is not.

    If they had a session about harassment in the movie industry, or music, during either of those components of the festival, it would have taken some pretty serious and credible threats to get them to cancel them, because those festivals, while they make a lot of money and are used extensively as promotional platforms, are also a lot freer. The corporate side is sort of on the outside looking into those, whereas it is the inside of interactive.Report

  2. Kim says:

    Five months is a long way out for the Public Relations folks.
    When part of the Playbook is death threats, I’m willing to wait until they’re a bit closer to the event before I conclude anything about what the organizers are doing. Because it does seem to me that getting a bit of buzz for panels like this is a pretty decent idea… And nothing creates buzz like “please, put this back on the menu!”Report