Category: vernacular creativity

  • #creativecitizens keynote: slides and speaking notes

    I’ve had a wonderful time in an unseasonably sunny London this week, which has included a keynote presentation at the Creative Citizens conference at the Royal College of Art. As promised, below are the slides and speaker notes from my presentation, which covers the relationship between everyday creativity, citizenship, and digital media platforms over the […]

  • New blog: Mapping Online Publics

    Just a quick note to say that I’ve started blogging elsewhere as part of the 3-year ARC Discovery project I’m working on with Axel Bruns. The project’s official title is “New Media and Public Communication: Mapping Australian User-Created Content in Online Social Networks”, and the blog is called Mapping Online Publics. We’ve been posting mainly […]

  • Out now: The Video Vortex Reader

    The Video Vortex Reader is a new collection of critical essays on online video, edited by Geert Lovink and Sabine Niederer published by the Institute of Network Cultures. It has just been launched, and it’s available for free download as a pdf! The Video Vortex Reader is the first collection of critical texts to deal […]

  • What is Flickr Video For?

    So Flickr finally ended the years of rumour-mongering and actually rolled out video. I was interested to see the way the official announcement carefully positioned the purposes of video on Flickr within the company’s (tasteful, cosmopolitan, playfully grown-up) brand identity, and its focus on self-created content: we thought long and hard about how video would […]

  • valentine’s day, postsecret style

    I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of the PostSecret thing, now ported to YouTube for Valentine’s day as a video montage complete with hipster ‘home-made’ animation: [the video is an advertisement for the books, btw, which is entirely appropriate for this made-up ‘holiday’] Happy Hallmark Card Day. Update: I didn’t realise how many Postsecret […]

  • can haz viral video?

    The other day I had the pleasure of participating in this week’s episode of Spark, a CBC Radio One show on tech culture news and ideas. It was a lot of fun being part of such a smart show – yay, public service broadcasting, long may it reign. The full show and related info, links […]

  • Oprah, YouTube, and the YouTubers

    [cross-posted at Propagating Media] So, Oprah has her own YouTube channel. I was very interested to see how the user community would respond to Oprah’s debut on the site, given the stirrings of discontent I’d been detecting recently around a perceived ‘dumbing down’, sensationalising or mainstreaming of the content that makes it to the top […]

  • to get better art we just need more love songs

    I’ve been thinking again about relational aesthetics thanks to Kris Cohen who has been shooting me some of the discussions occurring around it and related matters in art theory, and generally hurting my brain, in a really good way. Being the intellectual dilettante I am, I’m just genuinely interested, but as before, I’m also trying […]

  • Slides from my MIT5 paper ‘Vernacular Photography 2.0’

    Jill posted slides of her presentation just now – which is such a good idea that I thought I’d steal it 😉 I worked from a script, but the full paper still has to be written into existence. When it’s done I’ll upload it to the MIT5 website. In the meantime, please enjoy the Flickr-ness […]

  • a spot of vernacular creativity on the street

    Given that busking paid my rent over several summers back in the day, I have a special place in my heart for buskers, and street drummers are super cool. I captured this video (on my phone, sorry!) while out strolling around sunny Boston with all the other tourists this afternoon. Enjoy. Here’s a direct link […]