I Am User Generated

Great news! My dad, who’s a university professor, has just been granted his first sabbatical. Bad news, my dad is in his fifties and three years from retirement. One sabbatical, in a 40-year career, three years before retirement just doesn’t add up. Like all good sons my lifelong quest is to not repeat the folly of my father, so I set out to find my own equation that granted me a better solution to continued learning while working.

Stefan Segmeister, the world-renowned designer posits this solution: Given the fact that the first 25 or so years are devoted to learning, the next 40 or so to working, and the final 25 to retirement what if we cut off 5 years from retirement and intersperse them into your working years? By this math we’d take a sabbatical every seven years thus pushing back out retirement by 5 years.

Well this seems like a better solution then that of a single sabbatical right before retirement, it isn’t exactly realistic for us who are not owners of world famous design firms.

Knowing that I didn’t want to walk in the same steps as my father, and that I didn’t have the job security to take a year off every seven I decided to start Sabbatical Saturdays. Okay, okay, I know what you’re thinking and you’re right, this isn’t such a radical move but it does give a focus to my weekend. If I take one day off a week to further educate myself then I’ve taken 52 days a year which adds up to taking a full year off over the course of seven years. Essentially I’ve taken the same time as Sagmeister but just done it as weekly commitment as opposed to checking out for a full year every seven years. The sacrifice is simply that instead of nursing a hangover until noon, then doing laundry, then watching TV, then starting in on creating a Sunday hangover, I decided to devote a whole day to learning and completing a project outside my work discipline.

Let’s make no mistake, this is not a day to hang out drink espressos in the sun and pontificate whilst cogitating, this is a time to execute on a specific project. Any sabbatical has a rigorous set of deliverables. So the first part is to define those deliverables and due date. Knowing that I’m a born flaneur/procrastinator I’ve enlisted the help of a faux academic advisor to keep me on track.  I’ll play the same role for them. My “student” is interested in new media’s role in education and the development of critical information age thinkers, so I’ve assigned Peter Drucker, Richard Florida and Neill Postman to compliment the more contemporary authors Daniel Pink and Seth Godin.

Most sabbaticals also involve leaving the nest for a time to get perspective on your surroundings. Well this is a downside to a weekly day commitment as opposed to an extended leave of absence; this doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be followed. Take your Saturday Sabbactical from your local Chinatown or drive to your next neighborhood and work from a café.

So as it stands this is simply a creative experiment with an unknown outcome but worst-case scenario I’ll just wait another 20 years and take a sabbatical like my dad. He turned out okay so I’m fine with that. As it stands I’m kicking around three projects: A portrait cookbook, a book on nutrition and creative output and a film script on the 1968 student revolutions. Sure they’re loose ideas now but hell I got seven years to complete them and all I need to do is devote one day a week.

Good luck. Let me know if you need an advisor and I’ll try to find one for you.

Ubiquitous Participation: Graffiti Streets to Social Networks
We as humans innately want to express ourselves and have our voice heard. Now we have greater access to a wider public audience through social communication. Was this public form of expression born out of the graffiti movement where corporate public space was a welcoming canvas?

Hoping to answer the following:

1. What is ubiquitous participation
2. How has public self-expression changed
3. How has our relationship between public and private space changed
4. How has offline and online public decorum changed
5. How has individual self expression evolved
6. How has customer service been affected by low cost digital distribution
7. How has the graffiti movement evolved into a legitimate art form
8. How has corporate and political control weakened
9. How has media control shifted
10. How will the valuation of art change
Vote here to see this panel presented.

For all of you that follow this blog you’ll be well aware of my recent obsession with Mash Media Storytelling. I’ve finished my thesis defense on the subject and now have been presenting the notion to conferences. I don’t have all the answers but I do want to champion the cause of art making through appropriated work that is redistributed through socially networked channels to a mass audience.
I’ve had some great feedback and some interesting discussion around this topic but it wasn’t until today that I really saw a great manifestation of the theory.
I’m so grateful to Kutiman who created a project called THRU YOU where he sourced a series of YouTube clips where people were making music and then re-edited them to create a new beautiful song. For all my pontificating on the subject all it took was this work of art to be produced to really explain the concept.
Please check out his work and support this project:
Mother of All Funk Chords
This is What it Became
I’m New
Babylon Band
Someday
Wait for Me
Just a Lady

I’ve been waiting for danah boyd’s aka @zephoria dissertation to be made publicly available since learning that her dissertation had been approved back in December. I’ve followed Dr. boyd’s work for sometime now and would consider her work to be some of the most insightful and pointed research currently happening now on the topic of networked publics. Here is her dissertation as a PDF and here’s her abstract:

“Abstract: As social network sites like MySpace and Facebook emerged, American teenagers began adopting them as spaces to mark identity and socialize with peers. Teens leveraged these sites for a wide array of everyday social practices – gossiping, flirting, joking around, sharing information, and simply hanging out. While social network sites were predominantly used by teens as a peer-based social outlet, the unchartered nature of these sites generated fear among adults. This dissertation documents my 2.5-year ethnographic study of American teens’ engagement with social network sites and the ways in which their participation supported and complicated three practices – self-presentation, peer sociality, and negotiating adult society.
My analysis centers on how social network sites can be understood as networked publics which are simultaneously (1) the space constructed through networked technologies and (2) the imagined community that emerges as a result of the intersection of people, technology, and practice. Networked publics support many of the same practices as unmediated publics, but their structural differences often inflect practices in unique ways. Four properties – persistence, searchability, replicability, and scalability – and three dynamics – invisible audiences, collapsed contexts, and the blurring of public and private – are examined and woven throughout the discussion.

While teenagers primarily leverage social network sites to engage in common practices, the properties of these sites configured their practices and teens were forced to contend with the resultant dynamics. Often, in doing so, they reworked the technology for their purposes. As teenagers learned to navigate social network sites, they developed potent strategies for managing the complexities of and social awkwardness incurred by these sites. Their strategies reveal how new forms of social media are incorporated into everyday life, complicating some practices and reinforcing others. New technologies reshape public life, but teens’ engagement also reconfigures the technology itself.”

Carefully reading this with a highlighter has renewed my mind which has been thoroughly burnt out by the completion of my Masters. Congrats Dr. boyd!

All the videos are now up from the talks at Interesting Vancouver 2008. I have two comments on my video:
1. Why didn’t anyone tell me I talked with my hands so much?
2. I swear people in the audience were laughing at my jokes, even if they were courtesy laughs.

James Chutter @ Interesting Vancouver 2008 from Brett Macfarlane on Vimeo.