Placethings, a student created social media platform for mobile devices is a finalist in the Accelerator Competition at South by Southwest (SXSW), the world’s premier emerging technology event held each March in Austin. “Accelerator at SXSW searches coast to coast and across oceans for the next big thing in the tech business by the most ambitious talents in the world” Placethings competed with hundreds of other companies to become a finalist and will present at SXSW on March 15.

About Placethings: Placethings mobile media platform creates personal, shareable layers of media on top of real world locations, connecting places with “stories.” Tell people about your trip, guide them through a city, tell stories about where you’ve been, what happened, and what is important with video, pictures, sound, and beautiful, shareable maps. More about Placethings

Placethings was developed in EMAC’s MobileLab research group and was co-created by undergraduate ATEC student Nicholas Spencer and EMAC graduate student John Syrinek in collaboration with Professor Dean Terry. The project is a transdiciplinary and includes contributions from students in The School of Engineering and Computer Science and the School of Management. The project is supported by the Office of Research and RIM, makers of Blackberry and has also been featured at Mobilize.

The winners of the last decade on the Internet were YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. All of these are all social networks where the content is 100% created (or re-purposed) by the participants – not by some official content producer, publisher, broadcaster, or curator.

It’s old news that we’re all curators now in an interwoven, multi-layered dialogue rather than a monologue. But publishing and promoting our own work has another side. People have changed their expectations about how they participate with the arts. They no longer expect just to be consumers of art and content – they are also producers, and at the very least want to talk back.

A growing 24% of social net users are creators themselves, and contribute their own work right alongside that of long established artists and institutions. People do not want to be simply talked at or presented to. Publishing or presenting without some form of participation, in the emerging networked environment, comes off as something like yelling over someone in a conversation. Broadcasting, presenting, or publishing something is just the beginning, not the end.

This is not technical evolution but a cultural one – there are changes in the way people create and interact with art, but also with the creative process itself.

The internet, and specifically the social tools that have come along more recently, facilitate an ability to collaborate in ways that were simply not present before. And the idea of the solo genius and singular voice as the principal model is breaking down. It’s still there, still important, but now there are new ways to work with others, and the notion that art comes solely from a solitary mind, often in isolation, is not the only model.

Some projects do not work well with conventional collaboration or multiple authors, though this may change. Recently a major problem in mathematics was solved collaboratively on a blog. Might we see this approach widely adopted in areas previously thought the domain of the solitary artist? Even where this is difficult or impossible, it does not mean that work cannot benefit from input via a (hopefully carefully crafted) social network. This is especially true when the process, often carefully guarded, is exposed (or, in the language of our times, shared).

Some artists are now sharing their process on a daily basis, creating a much more active feedback loop with their audience. Former receivers of completed artistic output are now often participants in the creative process in terms of how they influence the work. So, while many artists still control the content, none of them control the conversation around it.

When I was in graduate school everyone had their own private studio. The idea was that you would go in and not come out until your latest solo creation was complete. The process was invisible, and often obsessively secretive. Process was discussed in frequently stiff, wordy “artists statements.” Now, happily, we have the opportunity to share our creative problems and process with others. It’s ongoing, open, and iterative. With practice – and this is an evolving model – it should result in richer experiences for everyone.

All of these changes in the arts and the new possibilities in collaboration and process sharing are just beginning. They are accelerated and will be changed even further by emerging mobile technologies. The current and near future wave of the mobile internet will mean a substantial evolution in the way we connect and relate to people, places and information. This new mobile Internet ecosystem presents radical new ways to think about how the arts can evolve. And the voice part of your phone, if you still use it, becomes an afterthought. Welcome to 2010.