Click Read More for the Culture Essay from the upcoming Networked Publics book and... leave your comments!

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.

The future mashups were produced by netpublics. More info soon...

Quite a day for iPod/vPod-related announcements...and its not even 10am yet (well, PST). Among them:

It's a Mod, Mod World: Podcasting has been called the ultimate in personalized media, since most podcasts are produced by amateurs for small, specialized audiences. But the real ultimate in personalization may be a podcast for an audience of one -- you. That's the promise of Modcast, a technology developed by Florida-based Bind that enables a podcast listener to choose which segments of a show to hear, then have a customized audio file generated on the fly. Other companies, such as Podcasternews.com, are also experimenting with modcasting -- which suggests that customization may be a big wave in podcasting's future. TechReview

This is a video of Chris Anderson's lecture on the Long Tail at the Annenberg Center for Communication.

This is a video of Mike Liebhold's lecture on the Geospatial Web at the Annenberg Center for Communication.

Reblogging a piece from varnelis.net...

A number of pieces have washed in over the transom over the last few days. Even more than postmodernism, Network Culture thrives on the paranoiac construction of connections and this post to varnelis.net has turned into precisely such a venture. Make your own flowchart if this one leads to madness.

First, John Southern sends this piece, Machines and objects to overtake humans on the Internet, on the prediction by the UN's telecommunications agency, the International Telecommunication Unit, that in future decades there will be tens of billions of objects connected to the Internet, leaving human users a distinct second. If the Internet becomes a vast grid capable of metering the world, what use will we put that too? Bruce Sterling is our theorist for this project, suggesting that the result is an informational universe composed of what he calls Spimes.

But where is this all leading to? At BoingBoing Xeni Jardin blogs historian George Dyson's article Turing's Cathedral, a reflection on his visit to Google. In response to a statement by a Google employee that print.google.com's project of scanning vast libraries of literature is not so much to make the material available for humans but to provide reading material for an AI (Artificial Intelligence). Dyson points out that with the sum of the world's knowledge on the Internet, connections previously unimagined and undreamed of will soon become possible. Is it coincidence that Google is a word coined by a nine year old? Google, on the other hand. denies these rumors. Or at least is sidestepping them.

With all that in mind, as I read Lev Manovich's piece on Remix and Remixability and pondered the self-remixing functions of the Soft Cinema DVD that Lev and Andreas Kratky produced, I wondered if we weren't really looking at yet another case of art acting as a kind of research and development engine or prototyping unit for society at large? In other words, might all of our interest in the possiblities of remix be a dress rehearsal for a world in which somebody else might be doing the remixing?

#2 in a series, #3 overall. Another episode of "Song, Interrupted", this time listening to how sleigh bells signal the death of the protagonist in a pair of Steely Dan songs.

Sleigh Bells of Death

I seem to be on a roll. Following up on the first podcast (that I had been meaning to do for the last 2 years), I present my second. This one is a longer form piece that started as a written concert review. But text just couldn't really cut it for this application. Enter the podcast, which imho is a perfect medium for this kind of thing. Comments welcome.

Marcus Miller Review

With “A Journey to a Thousand Maps Begins With an Open Code