So, moving on…

I Tought I Taw…

Today, I was delighted to Facebook-stalk upon a series of pictures from a guerilla project manned by a friend of mine and cohorts. It involved sprinkling a series of tweeting birds across their NYC Nolita neighborhood. But it really has to be seen to be appreciated:

Nolita Tweetie tweets, "Ate a cat. Tasted like shit. It was revenge."

From what I gather the endeavor was based in pure “why not?” whimsy, and to me it evokes a kind of tongue-in-cheek, absurd and literalist observation of the kind of amusing, disposable ephemera with which we clutter our digital world invading and occupying an actual little corner somewhere. 

Nolita Tweetie tweets, "Just had a fabulous meal with Naomi and Kate in Nolita."

I’m struck by how many fun, cheeky, hard copy leave-behind operations occur in cities worldwide. Sometimes there’s a greater purpose like the DARPA Network Challenge (if by greater purpose you mean a nice cheque for finding 10.1% of Nena’s stash), sometimes it’s the brainchild of a roomful of marketers, but the most intriguing exist for their own sake and some even ride the meme wave all the way and develop a viral life of their own (Bacon, anyone?)

Barking Up the Right Tree

All the while I think there’s the underlying notion that for all we talk of a digital, virtual, soft copy world, ever-evolving with the release of each new i-product, we still love the real deal. On a rainy day (or after viewing The Story of Stuff) I may even argue that our rampant consumerism grows from an increasing, almost fetishistic desire to stamp out a brick & mortar impact in an increasingly abstract world.   

The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Proliferation

Working in digital media, and living in an online world, it’s easy to get caught up in the virtual aspects of what we do and how we live. So easy, in fact, that it becomes refreshing and exhilerating to experience a work articulated in actual space. Particularly a work of social or political commentary, which have become the content mainstays of the blogo-twitter-insertnewfad-o-spheres.

When I think about efforts like the Tweetie birds, I often wonder what Walter Benjamin would think about the work of art in the digital age. In his 1935 essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, he describes how the aura of a piece withers in reproduction, divorcing mass-produced copies from the ritual, meaning and intent of the original, and becoming ideal vehicles for political ideology.

Keepin’ It Real

The world wide web being what it is, with each new Facebook/Twitter recruit or company determined to churn out post after post to play the SEO game, sometimes we have to realize that Content isn’t always King. Sometimes Content is Clutter. In fact, more often than not, it’s clutter. And the more of us generating it and splashing it around the series of tubes, the more meaningful NOT mediating your experience can be (so put your recording device down and actually watch the concert, why don’t you?)

So while I acknowledge I’d only know of the Tweetie birds because of dear mother internet (she pays my bills, gives me ideas and tucks me in at night), I wish I could have stumbled across them the old-fashioned way: a cute little day-brightening discovery in the midst of my standard routine.

A Web of One’s Own

But what’s really neat about the movement, is that participants pledge to honour a woman they admire (in blog posts, tweets, etc.) for achievements in science and/or technology in celebration of Ada’s life and work. They can then submit their hommage to the findingada.com database and entries are catalogued and mapped out, all in an effort to spotlight the oft-downplayed contributions of women in these fields.

The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth

Tanya McGinnity: Moshpit Philosopher and Community-builder

For my tribute, I picked local champion Tanya McGinnity, founder of the Montreal chapter of the Girl Geek Dinners (find a group near you: there are 60 worldwide and counting…) Not only because she’s a project manager in tech circles that I admire, but because she uses her considerable community-building experience to bring bright, talented and geeky women together to share knowledge and make connections.

“Definitely Does Compute”

I’ve only been going to the Girl Geek Dinners (GGD) since November, and I can’t believe how much I have learned or how many engaged and amazing people I’ve met through the events in such a relatively short time (Interactive Storytelling in Video Games! WordPress Tutorial!) As the only woman in my web firm for nearly two years, it’s been a treat to meet so very many other tech-friendly lasses (and a few lads, too). In fact, some of the events draw close to a hundred people (where do they all come from?)  I always leave feeling enriched and inspired (so I was rather bummed that I missed this week’s instalment), and that’s no accident…

A Lil’ Punk in the Trunk

It takes real commitment, drive and Thatchers to put on events this successful, draw the right speakers and reach out to build an audience, and Tanya does it because she is clearly passionate about building a better network for women in the tech community. As she says on her blog:

I come out of the punk rock scene and believe that when people fall down in the moshpit, you pick them up and help them out. I believe that you can do it yourself, without the help of a big label backing you up. I believe that we are all need to share and collaborate in order to truly be fulfilled.

She works hard to make Montreal a more hospitable place for girl geeks, and it’s Tanya’s plucky moshpit philosophy that makes me (and doubtless many others) feel like we’re not at it alone, that there’s a tangible community behind us. That sugar and spice might just be the sweet smell of success in the digital age.

Math Isn’t Hard

Tanya has exciting plans to reach out even further, to inspire school-aged girls to take another look at careers in web, gaming, engineering and other geeky fields.You can follow her on Twitter or join the MTL Girl Geek Dinner group on Facebook.

I for one can’t wait to see what she has in store next, for April’s GGD and for the group as a whole.

Thatchers Abound

Frequent viewers of Stephen Colbert will likely be familiar will his concept of “lady balls,” or “Thatchers”, named after some dude who ran Britain for a while (thanks to Sophie for the link). Well, the folks over at the NFB and Studio XX are celebrating true-blue storytelling cojones by offering grants for six multimedia, new media and/or intermedia projects with budgets of $5-$25,000  helmed by brassy Quebec women. It doesn’t get much more awesome than that, if you ask me.

Boys Allowed

Despite the gyno-friendly concept, mixed gender teams are encouraged, and a preference appears to be given to work with a clear purpose (bonus points for socially conscious initiatives), innovative use of interactive technology and, above all, the desire and ability to craft narratives that make an impact.

Creating Content for Change

This afternoon First Person Digital held a wonderful online seminar with Erica Priggen of Free Range Studios, producers of such viral favourites as The Meatrix, The Story of Stuff and The Good Life. The talk was held online specifically to reduce her carbon footprint, which shows that “creativity with a conscious” is more than a tagline over at Free Range.

While her presentation raised many salient points (including one of the most succinct explanations of broadcast vs. narrowcast I’ve heard), my favourite part was where she outlined and defined the phases of a viral piece as: Message, Choir, Persuadables, Public. The first goal of a message-driven viral piece is to reach the choir, the people who preach that same message and have been waiting for the right summation in story form to share their values with their friends (the Persuadables). From there, the piece makes its way to the general public and develops a life of its own (which she admitted can occasionally be difficult to watch if the piece is politicized or torn apart, as Glenn Beck and other right-wing conservatives attempted with anti-American/consumerist accusations against The Story of Stuff).

Choose Your Own Adventure

It was a joy to hear Erica talk about modern myth-making and interactive storytelling, but an even greater joy to network with a room full of dynamic, energized media professionals from diverse backgrounds, all armed to the teeth with innovative and amazing ideas. I don’t know how the First Person Digital juries will narrow their selections down, based on some of the project snapshots I heard floating around today.

As you’ve probably guessed, I’m among those applying for a grant for a side project with a good friend and collaborator, which is why I’m down to posting once a week until March 1 (I know, it’s sad: but necessary). What does our project involve? Well, I’ll describe it more in detail over the next few weeks, but for now let’s say it’s a hyperdrama that combines live performance, multimedia (film, music and dance) and social media to tell the age-old story of boy meets girl (online); 10 years later, they meet for real…

As I twiddled my thumbs in a seat by the gate and slowly dozed off into my bundled-up down jacket, it occurred to me that the end of 2009 has brought about more cumulative net nostalgia than I’ve ever experienced.

The World Wide Wonder Years

XKCD's One-day Memorial Honouring Geocities

Holding hands and skipping down memory lane with the collective web unconscious started for me in October, with Yahoo shutting Geocities down, and the fitting xkcd tribute to the free site building and hosting service that so very many of my generation (myself included) used to launch a maiden voyage on the ol’ Information Superhighway.

Happy Birthday, Dear Internet!

Just three days later the last of a seemingly endless string of 40th anniversary landmarks for the internet was celebrated, with the microblogosphere all humming “Happy Birthday” and a lovely interview with Leonard Kleinrock on CNN. In it, Kleinrock perpetuates a sweet bit of mythopoeia that magically transforms the first word sent via network from the rather mundane “log” to “lo” (of “…and behold” fame.) He gets away with it because, as this hilarious classic CBC clip of the 80s/90s reminds us, “Internet” is pretty amazing.

Blasts from the UI Past

On the same day as Uranium Interactive posted this adorable flashback Christmas card (note to unilingual readers: it’s in French, but you will get it, and it’s well worth the click), The Onion releases the following video, a glorious piece of web jetsam that hyperlinked its way across the series of tubes at an astonishing rate (if my feeds are anything to go by…)

Internet Archaeologists Find Ruins Of ‘Friendster’ Civilization

Rest In Peace

Along with losing Geocities, a whole slew of sites became fodder for the Wayback machine in 2009. As sites have competed for online survival of the fittest, it’s amazing how much people get attached to a certain UI or look & feel. There’s something so visceral about interactive media that takes nostalgia and resistance to change to a new level (just look at the complaints in your feed the next time Facebook tweaks its UI or rolls out a new feature).

Put on The Neverending Story and I’ll get misty eyed, but load up Super Mario 3 on a DS and there’s nothing like finding that first warp whistle… With online experiences, the stickiest sites of yesteryear hold such fond memories because the joys of using, frequenting and interacting with them are part of a slowly fragmenting and shifting experience: navigating a site in its native environment.

Boulevard of Broken Memes

Content is now broken down and cast adrift as digital flotsam on the high seas of blogs, social media, apps, aggregators, etc. The sites we interact with for hours on end are reducing to a core (Facebook, Twitter, Readers, News sites, Google, etc.), many of which are becoming “too big to fail” (but like AIG, it doesn’t guarantee they won’t be the next MySpace). And as they homogenize, the UI differences, quirks and design elements that distinguished older sites from one another are no longer as disparate. While the semantic web is still a while a way, I think the 3.0 shift will eventually have us remembering Web 2.0 more holistically than we recall individual 1.0 sites now.

Pining for the Adored

So what makes me nostalgic? Well, there are so many sites and software, and so little time to write. So I’ll save some of them for a new day. But for now, I’d have to say that hearing the ICQ foghorn or uh-oh! message alert takes me right back to the days when a shrill squeal from your modem was the happy sound of successfully launching a new mission in cyberspace…

Just try explaining that to the dude who looks at your CV, raises an eyebrow and says “Ethiopia, huh?” or, my personal favourite, “Where do you FEEL like you’re from?”

Cultural relativism can be a powerful force for good in the right hands, but it can take a while to learn to see past the frustrations. It has certainly taken me many years to understand that the limitations of a society are part of a greater package, and that appreciating the possibilities is more important than identifying what is better elsewhere.

The true TCK learns that many of those amazing things we appreciate about a place or a cultural are not wholly transposable to another. But elements of them are, and as our Global Village grows, the ability to appreciate multiple approaches to the same problem or grasp conflicting points of view for all their worth will become more and more important.

I, for one, am glad that she turned out to be:

• An actual woman (there were many doubters)
• An actual former sex worker (again, many doubters)
• A doctor working for a worthwhile cause
• Proud of her accomplishments and of her past

Politics and emotions aside regarding who/what she is/was, it is a good thing for one of the medium’s great success stories to ring so true. I wish the stories of so many anonymous whistle blowers ended as happily for them, or allowed them as much (relative) freedom on when to step forward.