Global Warming Can Be Fun

I’m at MIT today (and yesterday) at the .

There are lots of links from that site about what went on. I started to live-blog it, but quickly realized that the rate of idea generation exceeded my ability to type them into coherent form. So all you’re going to get is the first talk on Saturday, by Josh Green, a postdoc in the Comparative Media Studies program at MIT (and a very cool guy).

Viscerality and Convergence Culture

Is viscerality a real word? Maybe not, doesn’t matter.

Photo of strawberry pierced by pins and oozing… (OK, couldn’t find the photo online, it looked sort of violent, but it was just a strawberry.)

Zune is not a software experience, it’s a cultural experience. You can’t share the way you want to. They’re using a pain picture to indicate (and installation errors are all too common). Others have mistaken it for an orgasm.

Zune requires you to play by ITS rules .. we want to play by OUR rules.

Apple sorta sucks, but doesn’t suck as much as many things. Especially around DRM. They don’t give us the cultural freedoms we want either.

iPod docks on planes disintermediate the airline….which is interesting.

iPod turned him into an afficionado — dealing with a move from Australia, he’s stuffed his “life” and “home” into the iPod. The Zune has a different relationship with him. iPod / Mac feels social — sharing culture. But Zune/MS is a software relationship, not a cultural one.

People are starting to get it — a changed relationship. Ref comedy central taking down youtube and then putting it up only hours later.

Ted Stevens called the Internet a series of tubes: vacuum tubes (tech), or fallopian tubes (practice, squishiness)? It IS a series of tubes but it’s filled with blood and guts. (And, btw, a more feminine image.) Increasing acceptance of identity politics. Young Girl Image simultaneously invokes hope for the future and everything we need to protect.

Talk about TDK ads from the mid 90s and early 2000s — it’s probably a mistake to talk about tech too much. There’s a power in social networks regarding interactions with others even at a distance.

allconsuming.net — trust networks

Tactile relationships — audience != behavior, but rather a response to the relationship that you are constructing. “Vandalizing” images with bubbleproject is interesting, he’s not about the brands and not responsible for the brands. Encourages or encodes certain types of responses, probably not positive.

Impressions (old relationships) vs expressions (new ones — audience speaks)

“Slash” fiction (fan-created sexual stories in the universe with same-sex relationships) on Star Trek — visceral for sure.

When you encourage audiences, you get “spit”, but it’s good — because you’ve transformed into culture.

The paradox of media production — they produce commodities (at least big media). But in order to be successful, it needs to be transformed into a cultural artifact. And to do that, you have to cede control. And then it’s no longer yours. That’s problematic, and it’s OK.

So today, we’re going to talk about fan cultures. Tough term — because fan is a tough term, comes from fanatic. Suggests it’s exceptional, but it isn’t. It’s no longer ironic to be ironic, and it’s no longer fanatical to be a fan.

We’ll also be talking about virtual worlds: “The Joy of Second Life Sex”, Virtual Laguna Beach…

I fear I didn’t do it justice. He gave a great talk. I tried to clean it up a little bit after Nat’s request. It was also covered by the and by Rachel Clarke.