Rather than talk about specific technologies, this week I thought I would post the technology/social media authors or researchers that I believe are worth paying attention to.
One. Alice Marwick is a PhD candidate at the Department of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University and her dissertation is on social status and elitism in Web 2.0 communities. I originally began to read her for her earlier work on microcelebrity and internet fame.
Two. Jane McGonigal is a game designer and researcher, who focuses on pervasive gaming and alternate reality games, and is currently the Director of Game Research and Development at the Institute for the Future. She is especially interested in the way games can be used to improve the world and impact player’s cognitive processes, social relations and public participation, an interest that can be clearly seen in her work in World Without Oil, a multi-player online game designed to examine the challenges of a future without petroleum.
Three. Aleks Krotoski is a journalist for The Guardian newspaper and hosts their technology podcast, and also an academic in the process of completing her PhD in social psychology, where she is examining how information spreads through online social networks. She is also currently working on the BBC series Digital Revolution, about the social history of the Web, for broadcast next year.
Wildcard. Artists are early adopters and librarians should pay close attention to what artists are doing with technology. That is why I read Neri Oxman, a researcher in MIT’s Computation Group at the Department of Architecture and founder of its Materialecology design lab, who was described by Fast Company magazine as
artist, architect, ecologist, computer scientist and designer who is not just making new things but also coming up with new ways to make things
For those who are interested in library spaces, I believe that people like Oxman are who we should be looking at in order to see a possible future.
