Awkward but full of awesome power
I turned 30 earlier this year and I'm already old enough to feel digitally disabled. Compared, that is, to these up and coming humanoids that appear at the University as freshmen already packaged into local power collectives. Their bodies braille their way across campus while they engage the social information world through their cell phones. In our program, it can feel as though we are clumsily cleaning the house before an important guest arrives. Or rather, trying to hastily finish a bathroom remodel before we sell the house. The next occupant is the teenage civilization of today's digital society. They're the ones who can actually use this stuff, and in just a few years they'll be able to vote and dance all night long too.
This was on the xpresso blog at http://xpresso.blogsome.com/2006/10/23/21st-century-media-kids/. It is an excerpt from an article entitled Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture. It is by Henry Jenkins.
According to a recent study from the Pew Internet & American Life project (Lenhardt &
Madden, 2005), more than one-half of all teens have created media content, and roughly onethird
of teens who use the Internet have shared content they produced. In many cases, these
teens are actively involved in what we are calling participatory cultures.
So these gangly awkward bands of roving teens already assemble into participatory cultures, eh? Well, good for us for trying to build architectures of deliberative participation (phrase donated by deliberative democracy bullshit generator 2.0) into environmental politics at Lake Tahoe. I think the folks whom would be the most likely to use our website and add meaningfully to it may be MySpacers and weird metro climbers who show up at the crag and play Dave Matthews from their collapsible ipod/speaker combination. They can use buttons and text, they can cut records and make movies and still look dim and lazy. We might want to talk to some young undergraduates to get some pragmatic digital networking advice, and some guidelines for how to engage the youth who will be coming online to vote in the near future. They come as a network and they will probably turn into a lint trap. But maybe not. Let's be ready for the best in case things don't go rather poorly.
I had more, but then I started staring off at some undefined point in space for what seemed like forever.
Designing our Web site
Gerry McGovern is an Irish Web consultant who writes a
weekly column, among other things. His most recent column is about what makes a Web site successful. His point is that sites that win design awards are often the opposite of what makes a site successful for a customer:
"The Web is a functional, practical place. A great website drives the customer to act. It uses clear, substantial language, rather than clever, meaningless words. To quote David Ogilvy again: "When Aeschines spoke, they said, 'How well he speaks.' But when Demosthenes spoke, they said, 'Let us march against Philip.' I'm with Demosthenes."
The shiny surface wins awards. Real substance wins customers."
Besides our primary projects, what else do we need to include in our new Web site to make it useful to citizens at Tahoe? What combination of activities will be so compelling they will want to visit it again and again? Or, what do the projects need to include to stand on their own as compelling action?
Improve Your Newspaper!
Jason Kottke writes a fantastic blog that all of us should be reading. I found this article through him and feel like if I didn't pass it along, I'd be doing the cohort a disservice. So
read it. And be sure that you steer clear of Frank if you decide to talk about it.
The Long Zoom
A good story in The New York Times Sunday magazine today called "
The Long Zoom" described a new game that
Will Wright (creator of Sims, among other games) is working on called Spore. It allows users to create an entire universe, building through six different spatial scales: cell, creature, tribe, city, civilization, and space.
The game allows users to understand how dynamics change depending on the scale of the system they are creating. As we work to conceive of journalism as something created at the tribe or city level (to use Spore scale) rather than solely on the scale of creatures, this different perspective may enable us to see new ways to combine and change old practices.
The author of the story (Steven Johnson) begins by describing how each age has distinct "ways of seeing." He writes:
Most eras have distinct “ways of seeing” that end up defining the period in retrospect: the fixed perspective of Renaissance art, the scattered collages of Cubism, the rapid-fire cuts introduced by MTV and the channel-surfing of the 80’s. Our own defining view is what you might call the long zoom: the satellites tracking in on license-plate numbers in the spy movies; the Google maps in which a few clicks take you from a view of an entire region to the roof of your house; the opening shot in “Fight Club” that pulls out from Edward Norton’s synapses all the way to his quivering face as he stares into the muzzle of a revolver; the fractal geometry of chaos theory in which each new scale reveals endless complexity. And this is not just a way of seeing but also a way of thinking: moving conceptually from the scale of DNA to the scale of personality all the way up to social movements and politics — and back again.
We're trying to figure out what "the long zoom" looks like for journalism, for Lake Tahoe, for our own projects. I think it's a powerful "way of seeing" that has great potential for innovation...and in the meantime, we can experience what it means to live in "endless complexity."
