Shirky/Jenkins Videos

Shirky:

His theory about our collective free time as a vast, underutilized social resource strikes me as pretty true, and yet I think a bit of mental downtime every day promotes overall sanity. I myself have said "Where do people find the time?" in reference to some of the more pointless and elaborate projects one finds online (and also specifically in reference to World of Warcraft, which he mentioned during his talk). Yes, there are a lot of hours of free time out there when you add them all up, but there is a large portion of the population (with families and/or pets to care for, or perhaps multiple jobs) that has barely enough free time to do anything other than read a novel for 10 minutes before bed.

I don't necessarily agree with "It's always better to be doing something than nothing," although I guess all that depends on how you define "something" and "nothing" - for example, if you compare the "something" that is 6 straight hours of playing World of Warcraft to the "nothing" that might be taking a walk or just sitting outside, alone with your own thoughts, I would personally assign more merit to the latter. So many people have such a hard time being alone with themselves. I can't credit gamers for contributing anything more to society than, say, a person meditating silently for half an hour.

I really responded to his point about interactive media - producing & sharing your own content in addition to consuming. I think that's a succinct and accurate way to describe the direction new media is taking, as it should.

Jenkins:

I really disliked the presentation format, specifically the power point presentation with a single word in the center of the screen. Extremely distracting. I was able to absorb his point about a "read/write culture" versus "read-only culture" immediately, and I responded well to it, but my favorite part of his presentation was when he discussed "ordinary people living outside the law" and how corrosive that is for a democracy. I think that applies to many aspects of our lives aside from the digital realm, although that's probably tangential in terms of the class.

I'm curious if any of you saw the link between these two videos and the documentary we watched (at least in part). To my mind, the connective detail was the interactive quality of new media and how that activates our brain so much more than merely consuming it. Was anyone else inspired by the implied possibilities?