The Press Discovers Burning Man | Burning Man 1997

September 3, 1997
By Malcolm Maclachlan, TechWire

GERLACH, Nevada -- Burning Man, once a small, private festival, drew scores of journalists from around the world this past weekend. Time magazine and Life magazine sent reporters, and festival footage appeared on television as far away as Mexico and Europe.
     "The mainstream press has been looking for a way to cover technology culture," said Danny O'Brien, editor of the British technology newsletter Need To Know Now and a former Wired staffer. "They've latched onto Burning Man."
     Technology culture has been legitimized recently through the success of Wired and other publications, O'Brien said. This popularization of techie culture has been seen in recent films, as well as greater media coverage of events such as the Hacking In Progress Conference last month near Amsterdam.
     When Wired anointed Burning Man as the premier social event of the digerati last year, O'Brien added, the mainstream press followed suit. Thus the press has come to this week-long, Labor Day festival in the Nevada desert to meet some of the people who are forming the future.
     "It showed up in Life and Time all of the sudden," said Good Morning America correspondent Steve Fox, explaining what he was doing at the event. He said he had not heard of the event before being assigned to cover it.
     Good Morning America was not going to hammer the technology angle in its piece, said Fox's on-site producer, Jennifer Raemsch.
     "That's the way a lot of people have written about it," she said. "But it's not just a techie thing."
     However, Raemsch said she had met many, many people with straight, corporate jobs in the technology sector. Many said they had discovered the festival through the Internet, and had used it as a way to meet other people like themselves.
     Mike Colton, a 21-year-old intern who was covering the event for the Washington Post, said his editors saw the event as a "freak fest" when he first pitched it. They even questioned his motives for wanting to go, thinking he just wanted a free party. However, when he brought up the technology angle -- not to mention all the other press that was going to be there -- they agreed to send him.
     "I figured this was the year we had to write about it," he said. "This was the year the press has saturated it. The question now is if it will survive."
     New York-based writer Vida Vandella, who attended Burning Man to do research for a book on modern rituals in America, had a similar experience.
     "I meant to go five years ago," she said. "I came this year because I got someone else to pay for it."
     Of course, there have been problems with all this new press. For instance, O'Brien said, it is dangerous to portray Burning Man as defining technology culture. The festival is largely a reflection of the culture of the California Bay Area. Although technology culture worldwide is heavily influenced by California, it is not necessarily defined by it. Second, he said, there are many important technology culture stories that don't take place within the chaos of this event.
     This event, however, proved to be a new experience for many of those covering it. Photographers trying to take pictures of the naked people in the playa's mud baths often found themselves chased by their subjects and dragged in fully clothed.
     Over at the Cyberbuss camp, a popular journalist destination, reporters had to endure ritual pillow beatings to get interviews.
     "We made the guys from CNN do this," said Cyberbuss crew member Quina Rina, as she joyfully clobbered a subject into submission.
     Rina, a San Francisco State University student whose real name is Rina Natkin, said the Cyberbuss group doesn't really mind the increased media attention at this year's festival. The main problem, she said, is that many of this year's crop of reporters have not done their homework.
     "I just wish they would ask better questions," she said.