Reuben’s Keynote Intro @ Virtual Worlds LA
Monday, September 29th, 2008
Our friends at Virtual Worlds Management have made this video available in case you missed Reuben speaking earlier this month at the Virtual Worlds Expo in Los Angeles.
Archive for September, 2008
I’ve Got My DVR Set For Yo Gabba Gabba!
Thursday, September 25th, 2008
The Ting Tings on Yo Gaba Gaba! via stereogum
My kids may be too old for Yo Gaba Gaba! but ever since Bart turned me on to it, I’ve been hooked. It’s just plain cool and the music is great. When I saw The Ting Tings do this cover of the old Altered Images song Happy Birthday I went and downloaded their album right away and I’ve had it on repeat ever since. Whatever they’re doing over there it’s certainly working on me.
An anthropological introduction to YouTube
Wednesday, September 24th, 2008This is a nearly hour long presentation to the Library of Congress by Michael Wesch who gave us The Machine is Us/ing Us last year. His talk is about his (and his students’) study of video practice on YouTube. I’ve never been a big contributer to YouTube but I have been seriously involved in videoblogging and web video for four years now. Most of that time has been spent contributing to and interacting with the community of people centered around the Videoblogging email list where we’ve seemed to have gone through an experience parallel to the one Wesch outlines in his talk.
One of the ideas Wesch brings up by way of McLuhan (at about 26:00) is that of new forms of self-awareness. I know I certainly have a much different view of myself today than I did four years ago. And now, not only how we view ourselves as individuals but also how we collectively view ourselves is becoming something that’s undergoing constant revision. What exactly this provides is hard to say because things are rushing along at such at such a rapid pace. Sometimes, like Reuben was talking about recently, it may make you feel a bit crazy but ultimately we want this because as my experience has shown me and what I think Wesch concludes is that, this will be an extraordinarily good thing.