SXSW: A Year Of Innovation And Introspection

SXSW is always a mix of the serious and a bit of a journey into the unknown. This year, Austin was alive with possibilities and complexities. I spent four days jumping from one conversation to another, and a theme emerged.

The opening day of the SXSW Conference was also International Women’s Day. Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, joined the panel “Breaking Barriers, Shaping Narratives: How Women Lead On and Off the Screen” alongside Katie Couric, Brooke Shields and author and sociologist Nancy Wang Yuen in a conversation moderated by Errin Haines, host of “The Amendment” podcast.

Said Markle: “At the Archewell Foundation, we work with the Social Media Victims Law Center, which is very important and heartbreaking work. It’s parents whose children have taken their lives because of what was happening to them,” with “the level of online harms that are there when you have these beautiful, vibrant children that are either being so aggressively bullied online or, frankly, these young girls who are going online and they’re drowning in this world of comparison, that suddenly their sense of self has become so small that they don’t see a value in being alive.”

Next, we went to see: “Beyond Big Tech: A Landmark Youth Movement to Thrive Online,” with Emma Lembke and Zamaan Qureshi of Design It For Us, Trisha Prabhu of ReThink Media…