I had the pleasure today to speak at Northern Voice 2009. I’m so grateful to the crew of volunteers that have been putting on this world class event for the past 5 years.
I shared some of my theories on Mash Media with a savvy and engaged crowd. The session was “hijacked” by some really interesting questions on copyright law. Seeing that I’m not a copyright lawyer I could only speak on my own personal views on the subject. Some of my own personal views were formed based on:
It makes a good point that we all violate copyright every time we sing Happy Birthday. Information is a two way street that is decentralized and democratized. Piracy allowed America to industrialize very quickly thanks to stealing patents. Thomas Edison was seen as a pirate for inventing the gramophone. Musicians feared Edison.
I sensed that same fear today when I presented some of my own personal theories on storytelling and art making. I was surprised to read that an attendee was scared of my views on copyright. Admittedly, saying “fuck copyright” was a little harsh on my part
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!
def. Combining media memes together to form a new memetic piece of media
This is an experimental work where I combine three versions of the song Heartbeats by Jose Gonzales with the advertising meme of the bouncing Sony balls intercut with characters from Halo 3 repeating the same movements.
Will we ever get to a point where we’ll be used to reading media this way?
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.
In an earlier post I lamented the fact that within the computer and net space that things are meant to work properly. We don’t like it when our computer doesn’t work as expected or that a link is broken, however it is these flaws that make art so interesting. The same goes for storytelling. It is the imperfections in life that are so interesting to share through story. Can you imagine a world where everything worked? What a boring life we’d live.
Ben Okri puts it so much better than me:
“The fact of storytelling hints at a fundamental human unease, hints at human imperfection. Where there is perfection there is no story to tell.”
I’m worried that as a society we are focusing way too much energy on perfection without sharing our imperfections.
