Henry Jenkins and Reefer Madness

Went to Barnes & Noble this morning to purchase Convergence Culture from Henry Jenkins. (See this post to understand why I dragged my family to a bookstore on Sunday morning.)

I looked everywhere for the book: Business, Management, Advertising, Culture. Until I finally had to ask the cashier and she pointed me to the Cultural Studies bookshelf. What I saw was 'Reefer Madness', 'The best shrooms experiences' and other books about hallucinatory drugs and out of body experiences. Apparently, Barnes & Noble had problems categorizing 'Convergence Culture' and placed it under 'Cultural Studies'.

It shows how important categories are for human behavior. Categories help you digest information better and easier. And they have a lot of disadvantages: They put you in boxed you don't belong in and when you're on the fringe of a category you might consider not even existing.

On another note, Joseph Jaffe bumrushed the Amazon charts today with his newest book 'Join the Conversation'. Very cool insider event and I was impressed by ooVoo, the video conferencing and messaging platform.
Now, that's conversational marketing.

Information R/evolution

This brilliant video by Kansas State University Anthopology Professor Michael Wesch, titled "Information R/evolution" explores the dramatic changes the Internet had on our ability to find, create and share information. It reminded me of my college time when I had to spend hours in the library trying to locate information. I got used to the lightning fast changes in information technology that I completely pushed these memories aside.

This video shows me again why I'm so excited to live in these times of community building, connection development and reorganization of information.

Michael Wesch also created "The Machine is Us/ing Is" which I posted earlier and below again. No other video you'll see this weekend will be as impactful as these two masterpieces.

Thanks to Ed Lee.