In the digital era, reading travels a two-way street. Indeed, in the view of cutting-edge media theorists, a blurry, disintegrating dividing line is all that keeps the traffic apart
Urban dwellers recognize the challenge. Bicyclists and drivers must learn to share the road, and that’s not always easy. The same applies for authors and readers, particularly in the news business. Communities and conversations form naturally around digital journalism. Mostly, though, they are confined to comment sections on news sites. Journalists and audience today are only just shouting at each other.
Jane Friedhoff is a game designer, creative researcher, and experimental programmer whose work focuses on experimenting with media forms in order to create new, unusual, and even playful relationships between people. While at the New York Times R&D Lab, she developed an interactive journalism model called Membrane that has the potential to transform a reporter’s article into a community’s conversation. She is currently on the staff at The Office for Creative Research, a hybrid research group working at the intersection of technology, culture, and education.
A self-identified “creative technologist,” Friedhoff focuses “on thinking about technology that tries to project into the future – how technology will be used, what ramifications it has, how it affects people – and not just how it works today.
“The critical thing is to be working not just at the margins of the technology – where it’s new or strange or broken or interesting – but also working at the margins of time,” she tells CCC’s Chris Kenneally.
On Thursday, November 3, in San Francisco, Jane Friedhoff presents on her “experiment in permeable publishing” as part of the Books in Browsers VII conference. This year, according to organizer, Books in Browsers “moves beyond long narratives to examine how images and videos, alongside text, are being adopted to form new narratives, instructional materials, and scholarship. Charting the birth of visual platforms, new stories are emerging in a diverse media world.”
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