An Outsider Looking In

It's day two of MiT6 (http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum/mit6/index.html), and the conference is awesome, but a bit overwhelming. Not in the "wow, these people are so smart that I can't reach their level" way but in the "damn, I thought I had a good grip on these ideas, and these people know so much more about it than I do" way. Makes me nervous for my presentation tomorrow, but I know what I'm talking about, I've got some good ideas, and I honestly shouldn't be freaking out about this. This feeling sucks cause it's always in the pit of my stomach, but it means I'm taking this as a serious opportunity. Maybe it's a blessing and a curse that I'm at the last time slot of the conference. Oh well. Nothing to do really but present it.

What's been really exciting about the conference is being exposed to new ideas, which are forcing me to think about how my own research will reflect and deal with such issues. I mean, think about the replication of narrative: there's adaptation, appropriation, versioning, and translation all to consider. Then set those various methods next to something like transmedia storytelling, and what to you get? A jumbled mess on how digital media uses narratives within storytelling. It complicates all this thinking on how we treat narrative and what we do with it when we move between different modes of storytelling.

In another strain of thought, the term and idea of "Web 2.0" is really problematic. Web 2.0 implies that what we have now is a new version of the web that we didn't have before. That sounds so static, and the changes happening to technology on the web is much more fluid. We can do more with the net now than we could before. This doesn't call for a need for an idea about 2.0. The technology is the tool. It's the people who are changing how they use it.

There's some random thoughts for the moment.