The Walrus Talk at the Canadian Museum of Nature on Thursday night took The Arctic as its theme, and the evening was as inspiring and illuminating as previous events in this ambitious national series. It also demonstrated with stunning clarity the conflict between communications cultures that is my main topic on this blog. As usual,... Continue Reading →
Hi. This post lists and links to my first 50 posts on this blog, indexing 50 brief critical essays on contemporary media culture. Topics include The Leveson Inquiry, Occupy Wall Street, Privacy, Music, Food, Economics and more. Try one. 1. Happy Birth Day! my blog is born 2. Gifts and Books, Books and Gifts books as... Continue Reading →
A few weeks ago I gave a talk at the Toronto Reference Library as part of an excellent series called Treehouse Talks. It was a lovely event, attended by about 100 people and held in the spectacular 5-story atrium of the library. I gave an updated version of the talk that I call Know Your... Continue Reading →
Yesterday I introduced the idea that the greatest transformative potential for any social initiative lies in creating feedback loops between OS1 and OS3. By OS1 I mean oral culture and technologies and by OS3 I mean digital culture and technologies. I also said that in order to effectively implement such strategies, which I refer to... Continue Reading →
Interactivism proposes that the greatest transformative potential for any social initiative lies in creating feedback loops between OS1 and OS3. The objective is for these feedback loops to spiral outward, gaining momentum and reach, virally increasing their impact and generating sustainable social transformations. The greatest challenge in achieving this objective is one of reorientation. For... Continue Reading →
So I've been in New York for a few hours now and plan to head down to do my Public Gifting action at Occupy Wall Street this evening (Friday) after I attend a talk by Geert Lovink at the New School. Yesterday, Geert, a Dutch new media activist, and his collaborator Franco Berardi released an... Continue Reading →
Tomorrow I'll be arriving in New York where I'll be staying for a few days. I'll be speaking at (and attending) a cool conference on the future of digital culture and education called Mobility Shifts at The New School. (My talk is Saturday at 2:30 pm, Wollman Hall, Eugene Lang Building 65 West 11th St.,... Continue Reading →
It fascinates me how often political arguments in the United States revolve around the words of America's 'founding fathers'. Of course it is not all their words that matter, just the ones that were written down. And specifically, Americans are obsessed with the words these fathers wrote in the founding documents of American nationhood, namely... Continue Reading →
Wall Street is Fort Monologue. It is an epicentre of literate capitalism, an ivory tower without ears to hear. It is a paper palace divorced from all experience, from suffering and compassion, from love and joy. It is rule of ledgers. Rule of policies and laws. Rule of dividends and debt, all defined on and... Continue Reading →
In my last post I talked about the iDC listserv. Today I was contacted by a lurker on that listserv. His name is Matthew Stadler and with his partner Patricia No he runs an extremely interesting organization called The Publication Studio, which describes itself as 'makers and destroyers of books'. How cool is that? Better... Continue Reading →
YOU ARE YOUR MEDIA 