SXSW interactive report #2: Bruce Sterling uncut

karstenj — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 02:56:00 GMT

Here are my notes from Bruce Sterling's talk, uncut. Lots of diamonds in the rough for those with the patience to read through. You can read something similar on VallyWag. Or, just skip the whole old school written word shebang and listen to the podcast:

"tenderly confide in the audience and level with a group of people I respect and get where I am coming from"

"stupid year and video is a stupid medium"

"2007 the year video metabolized on the web"

"battle between old media and new media. not about media convergence"

"old guard live on artificial scarcity"

"the teens of coming. they care nothing for the proprietaries of media. time is not on the side of the incumbents"

"into Henry Jenkins, Yochai Benkler, Lev Manovich"

"hope and a new method of approach that will increase people's wealth and power"

"information is actually free"

"absolute torrent of the most arcane material at your fingertips"

"google plus wikipedia = the end of the eighties"

"the internet is growing visibly in front of you"

"new schematic of 1st/2nd/3rd/4th world:"

"global capitalism" - 1st world

"any form of governance" - 2nd world

"commons based peer production" - new 3rd world

"disorder" - 4th world

"in ten years, it will be obvious. more powerful than people give it credit for. never been put into mass production. use new media to beat a politics of fear. new social networks not fragile. very resilient."

"craig's list. not a business. gutted the revenue streams of major newspapers. "

"there are downsides to this. not a golden opportunity. that part is oversold. vulnerable to hucksters. downsides to too much fandom. fan art is terrible. never going to get great art by committee. fine for encyclopedia. aesthetically objectionable for art. at best, pastiche."

"mash-ups: tremendous vogue. mash-ups are novelty. need a little aesthetic honesty here. need new language of criticism"

"digital tools are melting everything down."

"contempory films are not about speical effects. special effects are the means of production."

"anyone who can afford a machine now has an information factory"

"what we thought were different forms of media are different browers with which we look at ones and zeros. the invention of the cuisinart art. blend it all together "

"deviant art. interesting, not great. electronic art sucks. electronic folk culture. precious and valuable thing. but not great art."

"beware of fetishizing the shiny new thing. 55 million blogs and all of them suck. I'll be surprised if any one uses the term blog in 2017. blogging is good for some thing but not that potent a medium."

"blogging is new medium. '3 paragraphs. 1 video. 3 hot links. Digg this.' don't have a methodology of critique that tells you what is good. typical of folk culture. lacks a critical assessment.

"very suspicious of any media activity that allows someone to turn on the information factory and leave the room. "

"forms of semiotic pollution. spam. machine generated robbery."

"freedom to connect. saw Reed Huntd do a pitch. former head of FCC. weary look of politicians. to say that he's disenchanted doesn't even begin to describe. broadcast spectrum auctions."

"broadcast TV is lower end, evil medium that debases the poverty stricken people who watch it. broadcast TV is dead. Put the internet over TV. no brainer. so many of the distinctions between tv and internet would go away."

"it would move america from nation #22 in broadband to the front. "

"pry it out of the enfeebled hands of old media."

"web 2.1. Here's what it takes according to Benkler in Wealth of Networks. engineered with though and care. socially motivated, commons based peer production. not the state and not the market so you can't pay them or draft them. 1st. divvy up the work. 2. has to be granular -- even if I do it, something will come of my work. even the little bit has to matter. 5 billion of the little bits and 5 heavy hitters. 3. modular. lots of pieces 4. integratable. has to turn into one thing that acheives something for society. not a ship in a bottle, but capture hearts and minds and be useful. not a word in here about ROI. self selected. people are choosing to join. you need an in/out mechanism. need two way membrane of differentiation. need platform for communication. trust construction. have to learn how to trust one another. 'ms. trust construction' 'norm creation' 'what's it all about and how do I behave to fit in?' 'whats normal behavior' world of worldcraft/second life/etc. transparency. can't be wizard behind the curtain. monitoring. someone has to watch it all the time. peer review. want the people in the group to know who's good. discipline. achilles heel of all internet efforts. hard to do good work. fairness. marxists upset about web 2.0. radically upset about MySpace. false consciousness bred. institutionalization. not slashdot. no one knows what this means. "

"global warming of old guard: a lot of hungry polar bears in anything that internet touches"

"computers are platforms for self expression than well behaved appliances. computers really stink as appliances. every thing is in permanent beta. challenging. "

"Czeslaw Milosz poem 'Gift' about fullfillment and serenity."

IRhetoric - Karsten Januszewski : sxsw

SXSW interactive report #2: Bruce Sterling uncut