I Am User Generated

I have the utmost respect for what Banksy has been able to do with legitimizing graffiti as a valid form of contemporary art, however he may have met his match or perhaps his greatest collaborator in Grey Ghost.

In Murketing today Rob Walker published a post about the anti-graf zealot Fred Radtke aka Grey Ghost. Radtke is well known in the graffiti scene in New Orleans for covering up graffiti. These square blocks of neutral color have become tags unto themselves. This is further evidenced when Grey Ghost only partially covered up a Banksy N.O. work. If he truly hated graffiti then he would have covered everything. Instead he has put his story touch on this tale and entered into dialogue with Banksy. 

This EA video is a great example of a mass-media company responding to a User-Generated piece of content in a really smart way. Instead of sweeping this video game glitch under the table they opted to created a whole spot around it.  Well done EA and well done Tiger Woods, or should I say Jesus.

For another iteration of my Master’s thesis I’ve been developing a new concept of what I call: Mash Media Storytelling.

def: Mash Media Storytelling - using appropriated media to tell a story through mass media channels.

This notion is largely inspired by Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky aka That Subliminal Kid and his work on compiling Sound Unbound.

Here’s an excerpt from my thesis:

In Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture, author, conceptual artist, and musician Paul D. Miller addresses, “the remix – how music, art, and literature have blurred the lines between what an artist can do and what a composer can create.”  In editing Sound Unbound, Miller asked “artists to describe their work and compositional strategies.”  What I will do in the following pages will do what Miller has done for music, for storytelling.  I will analyze storytelling strategies and how participatory media has enabled the remix or mash-up of stories, which has created an evolved form of collaborative storytelling that uses appropriated content to reach a mass audience.

As I Am User Generated regular reader’s will know, I’m keenly interested in one’s own ability to create their own celebrity online.  Now there is a tool for gauging our celebrity, or at least our own obsession with our own celebrity. Vanity Validator is a tool that Chris Anderson developed which use’s Google’s Page Rank to calculate anyone’s online presence. I’m happy to report that I score a healthy 62 out of a possible 100.

The Aesthetic Poetic and myself have been talking a lot about how the larger Internet community perceive us and the content we produce.

Wordle is a great visualization tool that helps in this quest as in scraps URLs for keywords then visualizes them. This word cloud can be seen as a visualization of how I am being perceived over at JamesChutter.com

This is a presentation to the Library of Congress delivered by Kansas State professor Dr. Michael Wesch. It’s close to an hour long with intelligent analysis on: media, culture, community, privacy, and identity, as they relate to anthropology.

Grab a notebook, let the video pre-load and turn off all interruptions. This one is worth freeing up some brain space to absorb.