Confessions of an Aca/Fan: The Official Weblog of Henry Jenkins: Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century (Part One)
Participatory Culture
For the moment, let’s define participatory culture as one:
1. With relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement
2. With strong support for creating and sharing one’s creations with others
3. With […]

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Two remarkable things get said in the recent Boing-Boing post Disney exec: Piracy is just a business model
First, Disney’s co-exec chair admits they’ve had an enlightened paradigm shift on piracy:

We understand now that piracy is a business model,” said Sweeney, twice voted Hollywood’s most powerful woman by the Hollywood Reporter. “It exists to serve […]

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It’s pretty obvious to most people who watch users act and react that they do a lot of what they do based on somewhat primal and/or emotionally driven impulses. And I’m sure there’s a lot of neuroscience stuff out there that explains how this works, but I haven’t encountered any until I read the article […]

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For a year or so now, “innovation” has been bobbing around at the very top of the memepool. Everybody wants to bottle the stuff and mix it into their corporate water supplies.
I’ve been on the bandwagon too, I confess. It fascinates me — where do ideas come from and how do they end up […]

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There’s been a lot of buzz over the last week or so about Jaron Lanier’s “DIGITAL MAOISM: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism”
[http://edge.org/3rd_culture/lanier06/lanier06_index.html] in which he warns of a sort of irrational exuberance about “collective intelligence.”
I found myself taking mental notes as I read it, ticking off what I agreed and disagreed with […]

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Back from the IA Summit, and my brain is full… brimming and spilling over.
One thing that I came away with was a newly energized zeal to preach the wisdom of Information Architecture as a practice of creating digital spaces for people to collaborate, live, work and play in. The focus being not on the […]

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In discussing some weird policies in the World of Warcraft online game, Cory Doctorow nicely articulates an important insight about environments like WoW:
Online games are incredibly, deeply moving social software that have hit on a perfect formula for getting players to devote themselves to play: make play into a set of social grooming negotiations. […]

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Virtual worlds can have a deep emotional impact on people. This is as true of an old-fashioned BBS or discussion forum like The Well, as well as for MMOGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Games) like the recently deceased Asheron’s Call 2.
Unfortunately, the more resources it takes to run a particular world, the more money it […]

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I’m not much of a joiner. I’m not saying I’m too good for it. I just don’t take to it naturally.
So I tend to be a little Johnny-come-lately to the fresh stuff the cool kids are doing.
For example, when I kept seeing “Web 2.0″ mentioned a while back, I didn’t really think about […]

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Wladawsky-Berger writes about the big picture of the Internet and the rise of collaborative work … here he references a lecture he heard:
Irving Wladawsky-Berger: The Economic and Social Foundations of Collaborative Innovation
[In his lecture] Professor Benkler is essentially saying that collaborative innovation is a serious mode of economic production that has arisen because the Internet […]

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This is a post I wrote only a couple of days after Katrina first hit the Gulf Coast (Sept 1, from what my timestamp now says, apparently), but I didn’t put it up because it seemed a little early to be opining about quasi-political technical philosophy in the midst of an emergency.
Now that […]

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Quick disclaimer: I realize there is still a lot of rescuing, grieving, and hard work to do in the Gulf coast. I respect the city of New Orleans, and its people. This post is just me thinking out loud about a bigger issue, possibly prompted mainly by my “corruption” in English Lit grad school.
I […]

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