Digital Laurels...

Brilliant, new brief! Lets shed the shackles of Design Futures and play with the possiblilites of interactivity.
"Design boundaries can be thought of as very elaborate systems of control."

I like this quote, it makes me happy, and i'll tell you why. In terms of interactivity, especailly online, power is alluded to through the vast choice the user has. There is an unlimited number of paths the reader can take through the information available. However one is always following a pre-determined route. Lets take the hyperlinks throughout Wikipedia for example. Accessing each of these is immediately taking anothers pre-meditated journey through the data. This is not necessarily a bad thing, the point is that power comes as a system of knowledge (Foucault) and this is best epitomised by the internet and the techniques it employs to give the user an illusion of absolute power (corrupts absolutely).

"The users of new media are becoming the content of the form."
This second quote obviously reminds us of Marshall McLuhan's the Medium is the Message. And it is completely accurate. All Web 2.0 sites rely on their users to create the content. Wikipedia, Youtube and Facebook - the only thing these sites do is provide an excellent platform for the consumers to communicate on and to interact with, and in doing so, they allow an endless amount of content to be generated. The very nature of the Web 2.0 medium necessitates itself and perpetuates itself. I feel that although the medium is the message, this is an easy excuse for contemporary society. Yes our technology is amazing, but despite these complex platforms for communication, our message is banal, vacuous and just plain dull. Take the content of most text messages for example, "im on the bus, where are you?" and Facebook comments, "wicked night last night mate, i was battered!" Im pretty sure this is not how DesCartes came up with "Cogito ergo sum" - "i think therefore i am." In our digital media age we lay back on our lazy laurels and believe that "i surf, therefore i am" will cut it. Well it won't!

In the same vein but in no way an insult to our guest lecturer today, we had Alister McDonald from Kerb, who designs online viral games. The guys an obvious pro, multimedia acronyms were hitting me from all angles and he talked about code like it was bread to a baker. However it's not to me and although the cute little games looked slightly entertaining for a few minutes i remained suprised as to why a company would invest significant amounts of money into this particular form of marketing. It appeared to me to be just another way to waste time online and subtley subject us to advertising. Another thing that struck me, the extremely ephemeral nature of web content, the immediacy of these games to the user, verses the time and patience it requires to action script and create these viral interactive games in their entirety. It is ideas surrounding this last point i would like to develop towards our current interactive brief.