Participatoryculture

Here is the preface to our #digiwrimo book club book. Seems it ought to have some catchy new name that shows it is a new creature not some dinosaur we call a bookclubosaurus.

I found myself on Kevin's website this morning at a loss to comment.  All I could say was, "I am feeling stuck in this week’s make: everything I do is remediation. Everything." Let's take the original newsletter and its translation into a youtube video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NiYpTmp0J-4 Now let's remediate that with Vialogues just in case someone wants to annotate our happy crew from Uof I Writing Project. Or perhaps you are trying to close a blindspot about accessibility and tech equity especially for the visually impaired so you translate into audio   Then you think you might want to make this sound file annotatable so you upload it to Soundcloud.   Perhaps you decide that you want to use a multimodal tool to share your take on matters.  That would be PopcornMaker which is being (as the software folk delicately refer to) 'deprecated'.  Since it is dying a slow death the YouTube mashup part of PopcornMaker no longer works so you have to use Soundcloud for your musical soundtrack. Roll

I was inspired to write this post by the work of Kim Douillard and Kevin Hodgson in a project called "Slices of Life". I was especially struck by Kevin's photos here (and I am avidly awaiting Kim's).  In Kevin's night picture, however, I found myself wondering about what I could not see just as much as by what I could see.  Having taken night photos before, I also thought about how limiting the camera is as it tries to record the fullness that the night can seem.  I know that is not a fair comparison in many ways, but technology is almost always like that.  In other words, in the fair light of day or night, technology reduces, delimits, and otherwise 'cheapens' experience. It makes the world more legible, but less wise. For example, below is a photo of a rectangular platte of ground shot this morning just outside my back door. What we see has little to do with it means.  For one thing, the metaphor of the 'frame' makes legible only a very small portion of the available universe.  In a way this is exactly