Larry Lessig: How creativity is being strangled by the law - or how extremists fighting for and against copyright miss the point, that digital begets unlimited copies and how these copies will be - must be - manipulated. (watch from 18 minutes on)
Clay Shirky: organizing without organizations- group action just got a WHOLE lot easier. what does this portend? Prosthetic group tools take our native social-ness and multiply it tremendously.
Seth Godin: why remarkable wins - and how do we discern between remarkable, boring, flash-in-the-pan and plain fantastic?
Steven Pinker: how language reveals social nature - and why indirectness, innuendo and suggestion are such fantastic tools.
Assignments
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Please spend all you time thinking about and perhaps even making several versions of the assignment due next week.
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Due Next Week:
Make a visualization that CRITIQUES and SIMPLIFIES a complex topic from one of the two choices below.
Please choose only one of these ideas to critique:
1.
Thomas Barnett: an examination of the US military in the next century with the WORST sound effects in presentation history.
shortest, least comprehensive version (funiest, though):
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/33
longer version:
http://www.poptech.com/popcasts/?viewcastid=12
The longest and best version:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4689061169761152025
2.
The Ecstacy of influence, a plagarism, is a long and wild ride through some questions of stolen, borrowed and plagarized thoughts, feelings and words. The Harpers article by Jonathan Lethem is chock full of great ideas and some serious contentions that worth unraveling.
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Here is a quick example.
Stewart Brand is a dynamic and exciting figure who has been saying things that no one wants to hear since the sixties. In this 3 minute presentation he says squatter cities are good.
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/123
