the internet as playground

There’s an incredible lecture/discussion series at The New School this weekend titled, Internet as Playground and Factory that’s just absolutely fascinating. Three of my professors (Ken Wark is the subject of the video above) are involved in the panels and I’ve been streaming the series on the Parsons website – if you’re interested in narrowing the broad topics such as massive transformations in economy, labor, and life related to digital media to very specified niches please check this out.

The purpose of this conference is to interrogate these dramatic shifts restructuring leisure, consumption, and production since the mid-century. In the 1950s television began to establish commonalities between suburbanites across the United States. Currently, communities that were previously sustained through national newspapers now started to bond over sitcoms. Increasingly people are leaving behind televisions sets in favor of communing with — and through– their computers. They blog, comment, procrastinate, refer, network, tease, tag, detag, remix, and upload and from all of this attention and all of their labor, corporations expropriate value. Guests in the virtual world Second Life even co-create the products and experiences, which they then consume. What is the nature of this interactive ‘labor’ and the new forms of digital sociality that it brings into being? What are we doing to ourselves?

You can find more information on the conference and stream it right here including a schedule of what is streaming and when. Come on guys, send me some media-conscious sounds!

Ninjasonik – Internet Bitch