Last night I presented the material from my earlier post, “Discussion: The Future is 1337“, to a few small groups in my Evolutions and Trends in Digital Media class at the MCDM. I’d say everything went fairly smoothly, though I did try to cram a great deal of seemingly disparate subject matter into the space of only a few minutes. It was a fun exercise, nonetheless, especially considering my having the opportunity to share with my fellow classmates 1337 culture, a culture I not only find fascinating but in many ways consider myself to be a part of.
I have three thoughts stemming from last night’s presentation discussions:
- John Musser from ProgrammableWeb had just given an excellent presentation about application programming interfaces and cloud computing earlier in class, presenting ideas I had never thought to include in my own presentation. If anything, APIs represent an established web service’s way of being a little more open and a little more 1337, by allowing even the most hardcore hacker a place at their table. Companies like Google and Amazon get 1337 – they really are 1337, as far as I am concerned.
- One student asked if all of this content sharing and commodification was a good thing in light of concerns about piracy and future production of content by businesses. I certainly don’t condone piracy of any kind, but I do see a movement being propelled by 1337 culture, a movement which is seeing society at large return to a form of folk culture like before the days of mass media – everyone passing around the same stories in a collective manner (or something like that). But, as this student pointed out, who exactly is going to pay for all of this free content? I suppose something will be worked out – we’ll have to talk to Lawrence Lessig or Clay Shirky and figure it out!
- I could have spent more time looking at mobile technology. I took the concept of sharing between mobile devices and abrogated that back to more traditional forms of digital sharing, like torrents. Will mobile sharing be the next big thing? I think so. Why not? Let’s do the same stuff we’ve always been doing, sans wires, right?
Overall, last night was a great teaching experience for me. I look forward to the big final presentation on Online dating I’ll be doing next week!
You might also enjoy...
Tags: APIs, cloud computing, mobile, sharing, torrents