To quote Eric Zimmerman, “If the last era was summed up by cinema, the next one will be summed up by gaming because it’s participatory.” We can extend that — if the 20th century was about creating and selling more consumer goods, the 21st century is about unlocking human potential and solving social problems, and in order to understand this, we need a new kind of economics that can create value from human flourishing.
Monthly Archives: October 2010
Interviews with Smart People: David Dufresne of Bandzoogle and Backfed
“Lots of people say that the Internet has devalued music. I disagree. I think it has devalued the traditional music product: packaged recorded music (CDs, mp3s). But the Internet opens up so many ways for artists to build a narrative around their creative output, communicate it to their fans and prospective fans, and then create contexts where that music can be enjoyed and where it actually gains value. The challenge is to find ways to earn a living from creating those “contexts.”"
Poetry in the Digital Age: Update & Fine Linkage
Earlier this month, we published two posts on poetry in the digital age: the first focused on technological challenges and opportunities for poetry, and the second focused on how to approach the publishing model. The response was huge: Publishers Weekly posted a call for action … Read More →
Interviews with Smart People: Frank Speiser, Co-Founder of Social Flow
“Technological evolution will make it easier to listen and harder to hide, and will make it possible to isolate people based on what they believe. If we allow ourselves to be broken down into factions and played off one another, then that’s what we’ll get.
On the flip side, technology makes it easier to distribute your thoughts and ideas. It’s a lot harder to stop you from reaching 1,000 people now than it was just 15 years ago. The cost of acquiring an audience of hundreds of thousands of people is pretty much the opportunity cost of your time. We can find ways to co-operate now that have not been possible in the course of human history until now. Hopefully the more capable of us choose to go that route.
I predict that eventually we’ll have a P2P barter system, a competing set of social currencies, and new derivatives based on social receptivity. It might take a while, but that’s coming. We’ll probably also pick up a whole new set of jerks that attempt to abuse all of the above. That’s just life.”
The Cost of Poetry in the Digital Age
Yesterday we posted the first in a two-part discussion about poetry in the digital age. In that post, I explored some of the technological issues related to poetry. In today’s guest blog, Jonathan Farmer, founder and poetry editor for At Length magazine, discusses the challenging … Read More →
Poetry in the Digital Age
An ongoing project of Zeigeist is to identify innovation gaps, places where technology falls short or doesn’t address problems at all. We place a premium on real-world issues, but we want to make sure that we address artistic and aesthetic ones, too. So we’re dedicating … Read More →
Interviews with Smart People: Mozilla’s Brian Crowder
Developers are the unsung heroes of any Web project, but they’re really the heart and soul of Mozilla, the ambitious open source software project behind the ever-extensible Firefox browser. The Mozilla goal is both lofty and entirely sincere: to bring together thousands of dedicated volunteers … Read More →
Zeitgeist Panel — Human/Machine Interaction
Thanks so much to everyone who came out to our second event last Tuesday evening! Big ups to our panelists, Irwin Chen (@irwin), Ian Spalter (@ianspalter), Jill Nussbaum, and Dan Paluska (@thesixmill), for some fascinating presentations and scintillating discussion, and a huge thank you to … Read More →