Andrew Keen – video snippets of the lecture he gave at the “me, you and everyone we know is a curator” conference

On: December 22, 2009
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About Tjerk Timan
During the last couple of years, I have been involved in Industrial Design at the Technical University of Eindhoven, both on the theoretical as well as the physical/practical side, always working on the boarder between the digital and physical. After an internship at Mediamatic, I wanted to get more involved in the digital side of new media. Currently, I am investigating the complex realm of new media [at] the master course New Media, UvA. With a thesis focus now on ‘objects that blog’ within the context of an internet of things, the challenge is to investigate the agency and influence of things. Especially when these things, being digital or physical, are capable of sharing, posting, editing, deleting content. And on who’s account? Within that same line of thought, the digital is often taking itself for granted maybe too much, where often the step towards WHO and HOW data is manipulated is left out of the loop. Taking these things back into the (design) loop is one of my missions, with the statement in mind that the way content is created and consumed has at least as much importance as the technology driving it. Furthermore, I am currently active within the Digital Methods Initiative at the University of Amsterdam. Also, I do some occasional freelance work, where disciplines differ from web-design to workshops to product design.

Website
http://www.tjerktiman.nl    

Although video is crappy and not all was recorded, I managed to save some stuff of the lecture by Andrew Keen. Following his words, I should not be doing this, because archiving something digitally is not archiving something at all and due the fact that this is un-edited material, I am only adding to the cloud of crap online. Still, some strong points are made by Keen, that I would like to share with my anonymous co-user of this Internet, who might stumble upon these pieces of raw, unedited stuff…

What I especially liked was the point made by Keen that as gatekeepers of culture, you should not be intimidated by the web-curator, rather you should defend what you are standing for (instead of organizing web-contests about remixing old video material) ((this refers to a comment by Keen on Julia Noordegraaf and her presentation about a remixing old-and-new video contest)). We should remember that all digital created material is still linked to the physical – objects, artifacts and events. The physical will always have value, where the digital is (at least for now) unstable and chaotic… He said much more, of course, some of it in the videos:

first part

second part – on curators

final part

q and a

One Response to “Andrew Keen – video snippets of the lecture he gave at the “me, you and everyone we know is a curator” conference”
  • Paulien
    December 27, 2009 at 4:32 pm

    Some of my notes on Keen which made me smile:
    • Sara Palin as proof of the emergence of the amateur
    • The curators/gatekeepers of the system earned the right to say no in an industrial meritocracy
    • This is a polical and cultural revolution that is driven by technology, not a technological revolution
    • What have they done? Wikipedia, Youtube, Google: they give people the tools to express themselves and build businesses around it
    • Half of the people think Google is not for profit
    • if you are curators, you can’t give in to this cancer of democratization of the web, Everything is free because that’s what it is worth
    • The left can only survive with embracing the idea of authority. It needs to start thinking in terms of authority
    • I am that crazy guy who is against the internet

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