Brand new project for Aesthetics of Interactive Design. A Database of the Self. I call it Database Me. And I’d love to hear your comments.

Joel G. on Dipity.

This is cool.

During his visit to the Google campus, Conan ended up speaking on digital participatory culture and how the power of the online masses has affected his life, his live show, and his future as an entertainer. He gets it, and he embraces it. It’s a great talk, really funny, and Conan gives some insightful remarks.

The section I’m referring to starts about 17 minutes in, but you really should watch the whole thing. It’s hysterical.

@Google & YouTube Present: A Conversation with Conan O’Brien

I loved the original. Really happy to see it updated.

On YouTube

The following is a discussion topic that I am leading with @paisian in our Media Literacy course at The New School.

As this week’s topic is Digital Participatory Culture we (Neal and Joel) thought it only suitable to collaborate entirely on the discussion piece to kick this off. We used Google Wave to formulate our ideas and get a basic outline of what’s to come and then moved it into a shared Google Document to put the last formatting touches on it.

The discussion this week will break down what we took away as the most significant aspects of the new digital participatory culture and attempt to stratify all of these new ideas with your experiences, thoughts, ideas and research.

Many of us in this course have grown up with computers and the Internet present for most of our lives. Those of us who were recently undergrads most likely connected pretty distinctly with both the Jenkins and Watkins readings.

Jenkins defines this new participatory culture as,

“A culture with relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, strong support for creating and sharing one’s creations, and some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices.”
(pp. 3)

With so much of our day-to-day lives wrapped up in the digital world, at some point you have to jump in and start contributing to the discussion. As Jörg has mentioned, Jenkins has shown us that in order to stay relevant and alive in the digital culture, we need to participate in it. Today, that takes many forms.
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Online search giant Google recently made its foray into the formal social media sphere with its Google Buzz service. Tied into the popular Gmail web-based email client, Buzz was rolled out to Google’s approximately 146 million most active users, the company saying that a social network has always been beneath the surface of its email technology (WSJ.com). But even with the current social-media craze, many users were unhappy with what seemed to be an intrusion on their everyday social routines. We’ll look at some of these users’ comments and I’ll espouse what I see to be some of the possibilities that we might not be hearing over the Buzz. ¶ Read More…

It’s no secret that I’m addicted to social media, or that my favourite outlet is Twitter.

Why? So many people I (or my friends) come into contact with don’t get it. They say Twitter is stupid. Given, most of them haven’t checked out the service. But while they’re making fun of Twitter, they’re off spending hours on end on Facebook or MySpace. You know, the old social media. (Strange we have old New Media already, yes?)

But Twitter is the anti-Facebook. On Facebook you’re bombarded with photos, fan suggestions, ‘Become a Zombie’ requests, snowballs, and God knows what else that is hiding in the depths of their app schemas. Last week it was suggested I become a fan of curly fries. Really? Curly fries?
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