It has been a few weeks since the Networked Publics conference that we convened at the Annenberg Center. It has taken me a while to dig out from the backlog after the conference and to gather some of my thoughts about it.

Just for starters, I love this photo posted by Jonathan McIntosh that you can see in the Flickr NetworkedPublics tag stream. It exemplifies what was so great about the gathering for me, getting folks across boundaries of academia, activism, and creative practice together like in this photo: Jonathan McIntosh of ad remix fame, uber autonomist Marxist political theorist Harry Cleaver, and our own netpublics fellow Merlyna Lim and very talented graduate students and activists Sasha Costanza-Chock, Aram Sinreich, and Richard Hodkinson. As John Tomasic has blogged with more insightful humor than I can muster, the event was characterized by a series of confusing disconnects. But doesn't everyone look like they are having a good time?

On if:book, Ben Vershbow writes:

Ray, Bob and I spent last week out in Los Angeles at our institutional digs (the Annenberg Center for Communication at USC), where we held a pair of meetings with professors from around the US and Canada to discuss various coups we are attempting to stage within the ossified realm of scholarly and textbook publishing. Following these, we were able to stick around for a fun conference/media festival organized by Annenberg's Networked Publics project.

....

As we enjoyed this little feast of new media, I was vaguely aware that the Tribeca film festival was going on back in New York. As I casually web-surfed through one of the panels — in the state of continuous partial attention that is now the standard state of being all these networky conferences — I came across an article about one of the more talked about films appearing there this year: "The War Tapes." Like Gunner Palace and Occupation Dreamland, "The War Tapes" is a documentary about American soldiers in Iraq, but with one crucial difference: all the footage was shot by actual soldiers.

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The video bloggers from Andrew Syder's class "The Languages of New Media" have posted their work. This includes vlogs of different conference moments:

The network neutrality debate

Discussion with "Makers" Mark Outmesgein and Mark Frauenfelder

and

the Machinima reel

Also, interviews with:

Paul Marino

Mark Frauenfelder

Jonathan McIntosh

Marc Tuters

Nert, who curated the Anime Music Videos portion of the event has just posted his trip report. As John Tomasic blogs, the event was characterized by a series of disconnects. Nert writes with his characteristic good humor about some connects and disconnects:

There were panels on the Digital Homemade -- low tech alternatives to the commercial media we're used to. Alternative News -- amateur blog journalism, link aggregation, etc. and Network Hacks/Hack Networks which had all the funky amateur tech, backpacks that double as wireless hotspots, networked catflaps, cellphone jammers, etc. It's good seeing the range the conference was covering, though a little intimidating as now I felt like the guy who goes up after all these intellectuals and says "er, I play with cartoons.." but hey ;)...Still it got positive feedback so I guess we didn't do hideously bad ;) The technical aspects were certainly appreciated more than the visual aesthetics which I was pleased at, I kinda expected that but still.

Reading Nert next to Harry Cleaver's response tells one story of what for me was a productive disconnect. Generational and cultural divides in what makes up participation and engagement loom large. But it sure was fun to have these different perspectives in the same room for a few days. It warms my anthropological heart to have designed an event where most people seem to have felt a little marginal. But more on my postmorten shortly.

I asked economist and activist Harry Cleaver for his reaction to some of the issues raised at the conference. Here is what he had to say about networked culture, politics, and what Marx might make of MAKE magazine:

On machinma, anime remix, and World of Warcraft:

Well, with respect to machinma and anime remix, it's my impression that the availability of tools is giving more people access to such means of expression. However, two things: first, the tools are still complex and, from all we heard, terribly time consuming so that "access" means little at this point because very few people have either the skills or the time and energy to devote to such efforts; second, as a result, it seems that the result is only a very marginal contribution to "participatory culture" and that contribution takes more the form of creating and circulating artistic works than contributions to any kind of community interactivity.

From John Tomasic's blog

The netpublics group at the annenberg center for communication at USC threw an interesting party this past weekend. Ok, I guess it was a conference. But in addition to academics, it hosted journalists and new-media “makers,

Some remarks on Friday and Saturday's "Networked Publics" conference.

From Michael Naimark's Blog

While I’ve always been a dedicated advocate of constructionism and of cyberspace, I left the NetPublics symposium fearing that if Karl Rove had attended, he’d conclude that America’s best and brightest were obsessed with living in fantasy worlds of elves and orcs, and ornamenting the urban landscape with colored LEDs. And I fear he’d be quite happy.

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From Will Carter's Blog

attended the netpublics conference at the annenberg center the past friday and saturday, largely out of curiosity about one of the DIY panels on friday, and because I wanted to see the locative / place / space panel on saturday.

The DIY panels on Friday (that I attended) were mostly about the standard self-publishing type stuff that I’m pretty familar with, although it’s always good having smart people like Sean Bonner and Joi Ito discussing it, even if their points seem sort of run of the mill for alpha web geeks.

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Technorati Tags: networked publics

curated by paul marino Machinima is a hybrid medium, a mix and remix of filmmaking and game culture. Its life started in 1996 as an afterthought--a nearly overlooked existence within the gaming community, then known as "Quake Movies." In the last ten years however, Machinima has matured quietly; finding a home not in its parent industries of game, animation or film, but in the users who have nurtured and recognized its significance. In its continuing evolution, Machinima has come to exemplify our convergence culture - an evolving space that embraces legacy creative technique while mounted on advancing technologies - and shaping how entertainment is made and enjoyed. This is a selection of diverse works developed by artists whose backgrounds are equally as scattered. They represent not only a somewhat loose retrospective of Machinima's history, but also the blurry lines between fandom, subversive fetish and grotesque commercialism.

curated by Steve Anderson, Merlyna Lim, Marc Tuters

Americans, so the argument goes, are largely disaffected from their political system, numbed by multi-million dollar election campaigns, bewildered by statistics and ultimately apathetic and ineffectual when it comes to direct political action. At the same time, recent years have witnessed the rise of a participatory culture that is enabled and promoted by computer networks, remix tactics and growing resistance to the war in Iraq. As media consumers increasingly acquire the tools and skills necessary to act as producers and distributors of their own work, an expanded range of voices has begun to contribute to a widely disseminated sphere of networked political discourse. The Political Remix program highlights a variety of these productions, each of which defies some aspect of the conventional wisdom regarding the fundamentally apolitical nature of postmodern culture. At stake in this investigation is an emergent understanding of the ways media practitioners are enacting new forms of networked community and political discourse that is specific to a participatory, recombinant, DIY authoring mode.

These are the videos for the three scenarios produced by Wally Baer, François Bar, Shahram Ghandeharizadeh, Fernando Ordonez, Aram Sinnreich and Todd Richmond.

NeutralNet

TCNOtopia

Automata