The past met the not-so-far-out here Saturday.

About 120 people, more than half from Whidbey Island, paid $30 each to attend a new-media conference at the historic Clyde Theatre.

“It was a smashing success,” said Russell Sparkman of Langley, whose online firm Fusionspark Media co-sponsored the event with Whidbey Telecom.

A panel of national and local Internet wonks addressed the question, “New Media 2012: Where the hell is this all headed, anyway?”

They talked about “next-generation journalism,” “cloud computing,” “content marketing,” “social media” and “online storytelling.”

They also explored “technological advances,” “hyper-real time,” “platforms” and the “online landscape.”

Sparkman said one participant plugged his laptop into the super broadband provided by Whidbey Telecom and streamed video of the conference in “real time” throughout the nation, “and maybe internationally, for all I know.”

Other participants pulled out their Blackberries and Twittered the conference highlights through the ether.

“There was a tremendous vibe,” Sparkman said Monday. “We took the 80-year-old Clyde and brought t into the 21st century.

“And this is only the beginning,” he added, “just the opening shot across the bow.” More new-media events are on the way, he promised.

Noting that “Facebook barely existed three year ago, and that for most people Twitter barely existed three months ago,” the conference promotional material declared:

“While it’s daunting to keep track of how far we’ve come in the past three years, it’s absolutely staggering to imagine what new media will look like in the next three.”

Speakers ranged from Tom Kennedy, an internationally known new-media consultant and former director of multimedia for the Washington Post Co., to Sparkman himself and George Henny, co-chief executive of Whidbey Telecom.

There was Brent Friedman, a Whidbey resident and veteran of the film, television and video-game scene in Hollywood, and founder of a digital media company specializing in science fiction.

He talked about digital storytelling coming out of Hollywood that will shape the way everybody will soon interact.

There was Robert Gilman, along with Sparkman a Langley city councilman, who also has an online new-media company and who focused on putting into context centuries of cultural shifts and how they effected the development of communication.

The broadband hookup allowed one panelist to present from his home in Ohio, Sparkman said.

Rachel Kizer of Clinton, a seventh-grade teacher at Langley Middle School, was rhapsodic about the conference.

“My head is full and my program full of notes,” she wrote in an e-mail to Sparkman after the event.

“I could have listened all day. Hope you are taking that show on the road.”

Participants took a walking tour of the city’s downtown, and later many of them attended a reception at the Inn at Langley.

“To a person, they were incredibly impressed with Langley’s ambiance and its amenities,” Sparkman said.

Sparkman, Gilman and others have been relentless in encouraging an “experiential” approach to the future of Langley.

City officials have been trying to find ways to diversify the commercial and residential population mix.

Sparkman said the possibilities inherent in the new-media explosion are virtually unlimited, especially in coaxing young families to move to the area.

“It was a very contemporary event,” Sparkman said of the conference. “We talked about things that affect people’s lives, jobs and incomes.”

“We’ve tapped into something here,” he said. “It’s a matter of talking about it and putting into place the resources to advance this.”

“There’s a lot of optimism that there is opportunity,” Sparkman added. “People are saying, ‘We could move here, we could live here, we could do this.’”

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