On Wednesday night, Penn Schoen Berland (and our friends at Burson-Marsteller) hosted the Strategy & Vision dinner at the 2010 Bloomberg BusinessWeek Media Summit. 70 executives representing leading technology, finance and media firms took in the views from the Signature Room on the 50^th floor of the McGraw-Hill building in advance of the evening’s marquee event – a conversation between Paul Bergevin, the General Manager of Intel’s Global Communications Group and PSB CEO and Burson-Marsteller Worldwide CEO Mark Penn, interviewed by PSB Chairman Donald A. Baer,

In keeping with the topic at hand, “Communicating in a time of Constant Change - the Role of Technology and the Media,” their wide-ranging discussion covered the global challenges posed by the recession, the emergence of Washington, D.C. as a competitor to New York for the title of economic capital of America, and the difficulty of communicating the value of technology in an era lacking any central overarching technological mission (such as splitting the atom).

Mr. Bergevin observed that the societies with the highest rates of computerization also have the highest levels of productivity – and that the rates are correlated, asserting that the PC is an underpenetrated product. Mr. Penn suggested that messaging for technology companies is more difficult now than it was when goals such as putting a man on the moon or a PC on every desktop created ready narratives for individual technologies. Mr. Bergevin expanded on that, noting that he views the Internet’s growing ubiquity as a strong theme for the our technological era (even though this quest may be less unifying than the moonshot) – and that technological innovation might even be speeding up, despite the lack of an officially expressed common goal.  

Led by able moderating from Mr. Baer, the group enjoyed a nice evening and great discussion. Check out the photo above, and let us know your views on what the unifying theme of our technological era might be.