One way to identify cool people: they’re willing to talk with you even when you disagree with them on issues near and dear to their hearts. Mark Wallace and John Swords both care passionately about the emergence of new three-dimensional spaces like Second Life. I don’t – well, I do, but I think the hype greatly exceeds the current importance of these spaces. But Mark and John are gentlemen and they sought me out at South by Southwest to do a podcast, which ended up focusing on things I think are cool – online activism in the developing world, questioning the cyberutopian myth, ways to get geeks to pay attention to the South. It’s half an hour long and covers a lot of the ground I’m trying to cover in talks these days, like the talk I’ll be giving at the New School next week with danah boyd and Trevor Sholtz. Give it a listen if you’re interested…
Using Flickr to post text as images in China. Brilliant. Where can I read more about this?
I got the example from Isaac Mao at a talk he gave in Manila a little over a year ago. If you go back and look at my blog from about a year ago, you might find my notes from that talk – try searching “isaac mao site:ethanzuckerman.com” and see what you get…
That was a really fun interview, thanks again, Ethan, for hanging out with us in that weird corner of the conference hall.
I actually don’t think we disagree all that much, I just think we’re pushing different parts of the space right now. I totally agree that VWs are over-hyped. But the broader collection of 3D online technologies that I try to cover at 3pointD is something that I do think is going to be very important going forward in a variety of places — we talk about one or two in terms of maps in Bahrain and elsewhere on the podcast. Also totally agree that the “current importance” is not all that important, in the broader scheme of things. But I’m pretty convinced that 3D tech of various sorts (not just virtual worlds) is going to have a deep effect on the way we lives our lives in the future. It’s not a zero-sum game; my focus on 3D stuff shouldn’t detract from your focus on global voices. It’s all part of the same broad spectrum of using these digital tubes to connect people more effectively.
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