Talking Sex, Tech & Social at SXSW 2016

robin.grant

It feels like we’ve only just recovered from this year’s SXSW, and the festival jumps right back on our agenda. In 2015, I was lucky enough to see some incredible speakers, ranging from the useful, the inspirational and some (often the best of the bunch) who were just plain weird.

So, in a bid to join this esteemed line up at SXSW in 2016, we’ve put together some panel submissions covering everything from kids and tech to the future of sex, with a bit of social innovation in the middle. If you like what you see, please vote for our panels, share them and leave your feedback – we’d love to hear what you think.

Kids & Screen Time: Defining Tomorrow’s Leaders
Children born today will have spent a full year glued to screens before they reach the age of seven. They are learning to use smartphones and tablets even before they can talk. For them, the cinema is “the biggest iPad” they have ever seen. The debate of screen time vs play time is out of date. Mobiles, tablets, smartphones and consoles can be really helpful if used in the right place to help children learn.

In this panel, our Chief Strategy Officer Mobbie Nazir teams up with Dr Jim Taylor, world-renowned psychologist and author of the book ‘Raising Generation Tech’. Together, Mobbie and Jim will explore how kids’ increased access to online play is affecting their confidence, social awareness, relationship building and decision making; and how this is shaping the leadership skills of the future.

Visit the SXSW PanelPicker here to vote for this panel.

How We Got to Social
In his book ‘How We Got to Now: Six Innovations that Made the Modern World‘, Steven Johnson explains how the innovations that we use in our everyday lives stem from seemingly unrelated fields. For example, how did the invention of air conditioning allowed major migrations to previously inaccessible areas of the earth? And how did our battle against dirt help create the microchips in our smartphones and computers?

Our Managing Directors in Italy, Stefano, Ottavio and Gabriele will use this approach to explore the unexpected events that led to social technologies becoming an ingrained part of our lives and how this has affected our interpersonal relationships.

Visit the SXSW PanelPicker here to vote for this panel.

Sex, Social and the Future of Love
Each year, there are more than 250,000 conversations about sex on social in the UK alone. #aftersexselfies, Whisper confessions, saucy Snapchats, the rise of Tinder – social media is rife with sex. Or at least, that’s what we’ve been led to believe…

In this panel, We Are Social’s Marketing & Innovation Director Tom Ollerton teams up with Hannah Witton, a vlogger specialising in sexuality to bust some of the biggest sex and social myths. They’ll explain why a woman with a grapefruit is a more credible sexpert than any brand. And we explore why sex doesn’t always sell on social. You might even get your hands on some of the latest connected sex toys… surely that alone is worth a thumbs up.

Visit the SXSW PanelPicker here to vote for this panel – and you can check out Hannah’s TEDx talk and Tom’s sex and innovation podcast in the videos below, should you need any further persuasion.