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The day before I leave, the sun finally shines on Vancouver. It's saying goodbye, fuck off, remember the endless rains? They're going back to Toronto with you, packed snugly in your suitcase beside wrinkled underwear and five hundred peanut butter bar snack samples.

I also have another conference bag to add to the collection. Every conference packs up this heap of shit that they give you when you register. Usually it's a totebag full of pamphlets and information about the host city, a conference schedule and some other neat, yet ultimately useless, knick-knacks. The Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education gave me a waterproof poncho, for example. AoIR kept it simple and gave me a wallet-slash-nametag-slash-change purse. It is well understood by all parties involved that these things will never be used beyond the confines of the conference in question, but dammit we paid $250 for something. It's akin to the mentality behind buying computer software and feeling vindicated because it comes wrapped in ten billion manuals and layers of plastic wrap: you feel happy that there's something tangible there, even if it's just garbage. Bang for the buck.

The conference itself was worthwhile, I don't mind saying. Henry Jenkins. danah boyd. Ian Bogost. These are the big, sexy, academic names that I didn't talk to. I did, however, drink ten billion cups of coffee (bang for the buck!) and jitter though presentation after presentation on World of Warcraft and Second Life, two places I don't think I ever want to visit. Interesting people milled and chatted and said deep things, and I don't think I've ever thought so much about Facebook, blogs and Web 2.0. Well not from a critical perspective, anyway. My brain literally ached at the end of each day, rattled about inside my skull with a nonstop barrage of theoretical bullets and "Yes that's interesting, but what if..."s. I met scholars whose names I forget but whose articles I've read before, somewhere, off in a library or a grad lounge. They came from Sweden and MIT and South Korea, linked worldwide by this crazy little Internet thing. They gave me buttons and business cards, and I gave them pieces of lint from my jacket pocket and refilled their coffees for them.

The Internet is a wonky-ass place, full of bizarre idiosyncrasies and there are plenty of people nerdy enough to study them. I am one of those people. There is a lot of mind-time wasted on topics which really don't deserve much thought. Conclusions are reached through multi-million dollar studies which any half-sane person could've deduced from five minutes of simple observation. Things are picked apart down to their barest bones before someone wisely (and inevitably) suggests that a "holistic, multi-disciplinary approach to further study is needed." But there are also a lot of people who are out there talking to users, to industry, to critics. They're poking and prodding at problems which genuinely have some bearing on our lives and culture. The real challenge seems to be figuring out which is which; what's drek and what's advancement in thought.

Someone should Wikipedia that.

Posted by Chris at 02:05 AM >> Commentations (2)