It only took three years of hearing about Jane McGonigal before we were finally in the same room together at Intel’s Street Talk: An Urban Computing Happening. The conference was most magnificent because it was a gathering of some of my favorite researchers, all talking about what urban life meant, how pervasive technologies were evolving, gaming and other constructions of sociability in a digital world. Fun fun fun.
Yet, meeting Jane was just such a pleasure – it took far too long and too many misses. Everyone out there who was determined that we should meet was right-on. She’s got immense amounts of spunk and she puts together creative public games; she studies performance and bridges the digital/physical divide in a total complementary way to me. Even better: she has a pet word that is awfully similar to my own. Pareidolia is “a type of illusion or misperception involving a vague or obscure stimulus being perceived as something clear and distinct.” [My favorite word is apophenia: “the spontaneous perception of connections and meaningfulness of unrelated phenomena.”]
hooray!
wonder twins activate!
Would you agree that “the spontaneous perception of connections and meaningfulness” is one way of defining a religious experience?
-Logan
street talk — intro
I went to the Street Talk event at Intel Labs in Berkeley last Friday. I meant to post about this earlier, but blog breakage got in the way. Anyway, it was rather tiring… lots of sitting still and listening to lots of people talk, but in the end it w…
street talk — city as open source
Howard Rheingold — Institute for the Future talking about Smart Mobs crystallize community collected action urban emergence user appropriation a small-seeming technology can turn into big changes in collective action lowering a threshold does a lot. “…
street talk — city as open source
Howard Rheingold — Institute for the Future talking about Smart Mobs crystallize community collected action urban emergence user appropriation a small-seeming technology can turn into big changes in collective action lowering a threshold does a lot. “…