Think that's controversial? It is, and with good reason: in an era where Stephen Colbert (playing a character… many people don't know that) and Jon Stewart are regularly touted as being more entertaining and informative than so-called "serious" anchors and reporters, we choose what comes to us.
In many cases, that means we'd rather listen to what makes sense and appeals to our values, what makes us feel that we're right. Opinions we can agree with, facts — well, nevermind the facts, Ma'am — there's a newspaper or a blog for each & everyone. And in cases where those voids aren't filled yet, they will soon be, often out of passion and/or moneymaking opportunities.
On one hand, there are rational signs of danger: pseudoscientific quackery being touted as "herbal cures", bigfoot bloat, CNN's front page prioritizing celeb gossip that rivals Perez Hilton sans the crude white scrawlings (but isn't that what the people want?), and too much nonsense to… make sense of.
On the other, not only is it in our power to choose, we feel more active getting a voice out there, lending a slant to stories we care about. I know this daily through popurls, the mighty 1-page aggregator. The sites it tabulates are many of the Net's prominent voices, with politics, sex, scandal (a mix of the aforementioned two), and WTFness colliding with more casual human interest and tech tales. It is a stark, gripping overview of what we want to matter.
It wouldn't be long until people paid news to be written for them.
Some Resis have asked whether I’d be doing an event during Second Life’s 5th Birthday (SL5B). Yes, indeed I am!
Alongside Kate and Jeremy Linden (of our Documentation Team) and some of our Residents, we’re hosting a Community Enlightenment panel at the SL5B Linked stage, pictured above. It happens TODAY (2008-07-03) @ 3 PM PDT.
Description from the panels event list:
Second Life is full of features and services ready to be explored. Our panel will introduce information about Groups, Content Creation, as well as Educational Resources and how they relate. Join our casual gathering of Q&A and enhance your in-world experience.
It’ll be in text chat. Bring your questions, including your curiosities about video tutorials. You know I always love those!
One (of many) kewl things in Second Life is print media can be enlarged so it’s bigger than an SUV. Witness my wife and I, standing atop a copy of the July 2008 issue of The BEST of SL, for which I was interviewed by Cherie Parker and photographed by Keiko Morigi.
Get the magazine inworld, I’m on the cover. I talked at length, so I’m sure it was a challenge to transcribe my run-on sentences which are allergic to punctuation… thanks for enduring, Cherie, and good news, everybody! Thanx to Cherie Parker and Fricker Fraker, there’s an audio recording.
Read the full article →
I had a fantabulous time taking questions and receiving answerage on Teen Second Life yesterday. Thanx to George, Amber, Lexie, and Mia Linden of our Volunteer Team (aka VTeam) for organizing this and making me feel so welcome. Thanx also to Mia for moderating and getting the transcript up so quickly!
There was a lot of energy, and amidst some really fun questions like:
“have you ever been griefed while shooting a video tutorial?”
I was thrilled to see some familiar faces I sometimes ping on other social networks like Twitter and Flickr. Here’s a BIG thanxies to Daniel Voyager for not just the picture above, but being a growing link star (this ability, I can relate to) and maintaining a helpful and enlightening blog.
Of course, I had to wear my Watermelon Dazzle Bat avatar crafted by Sylver Bu (you may’ve seen it on lindenlab.com), and encourage the aspirations and future of our precocious Resis. When I was a teen, I wanted just about nothing more than to have role models I could aspire to, so now, it’s my turn to inspire in kind — *touched*
you guys rock and like I said at the end, I hope to do followup… including filming more video tutorials on TSL.