User talk:Lemi Lune

The Interactive Media Wiki you refer to was created a few years ago by students in my courses. They were assigned to topics and graded on their input. This class meets once per year from January to May, so there is a always a lull between edits. We welcome your thoughts and have no limitations on these pages, other than keeping the focus on emerging media communication topics. Tools, trends, theories and interactive projects are all appropriate. All of the topics you mentioned are highly relevant.

I would be interested to learn more about your background. My interest in this area started about 1980 when I launched a music technology program at our university. This lead to the integration of other kinds of new media including video, audio, virtual reality, online social networking, wiki groups, etc. My background is music performance, but my current interests focus on all interactive media including 3D virtual environments, high def. imaging, 3D sound, etc.

What are your interests?

I started an informal unpaid creative exchange several weeks ago with a high school classmate who is a film producer, giving advice on how to market his ideas as internet web series. I did some preliminary research on internet web series and offered a summary along with my perception of the emerging market and viral marketing.

I think my efforts were poorly received; he just didn't get the theory and disputed me on, I think, irrelevant points. Since then, I heard Andros Sturgeon as a call-in guest on a public radio talk show on my regional radio station and realized, here is a producer and fellow Oregonian who clearly does get it, son of writer and fellow former Oregonian Ted Sturgeon whose work does indeed represent many different points of view.

'It' is simply shorthand for a new paradigm for distributive and collaborative media that bypasses the advantages of monopoly and even to a certain leveraging of wealth and profit. Most pertinently, traditional media sectors vastly underestimate popular resentment at and undermining of manipulative, authoritarian, costly, censored and biased content.

You've probably guessed I'm a marketer of some type. I did incidental arts marketing on a very small scale for several years and marketed a co-op natural foods store for three years while a freelance graphic designer. It never sat well with me and I've long been searching for a collaborative business model which preserves individual creativity, license and democratic or consensual process. One might think a co-op might be a suitable place; however my co-op (along with many others) was quickly dropping such models in favor of traditional corporate hierarchy.

Previous to all that, I've been many things, a journalist, sculptor, anthropologist but primarily academic in my thinking while trying to make an ethical living as a writer and consultant. Recently I resigned a full time job marketing the co-op and then suffered a neck injury which has severely limited my work practice. I make a very small amount selling used books and I have a poetry book coming out, but good paying income has dried up. Luckily I now live rent-free and can garden and sell and perhaps even teach or consult locally on a cooperative basis, but as a business I don't think I can follow a traditional model anymore--stress to my injury and lack of creative liberty being the main objections.

I also do feel I have something to say. Magical consciousness has long been an interest of mine, for instance. I did my undergrad thesis on it and feel I have insights (it might be summarized as application of perception psychology and structuralism to belief). I am also very interested in construction of gender and its psychological implications, following Freud and Dorothy Dinnerstein.

So, to get to the point I have thought of publishing, which I have experience in. However, I have determined traditional book publishing a difficult if not retrograde model. I have few academic connections and no higher degrees. I find myself more and more leaning to Wikipedia as my ability to gather print research materials wanes. In order to simply consider myself a relevant and working scholar and critic, I have decided to jump in as a volunteer. At least I will be tied into a more research-oriented community and free of my own marketing costs and imperatives. I still have hopes for a book or teaching or consulting work down the road, and maybe the research will lead to contacts as well as knowledge.

Sorry for the length, respond with comments welcome,

Lemi Lune (talk) 15:24, 6 May 2009 (UTC)