lextopia

I’m going to refashion myself as “a futurist.” I know that this makes me sound like I haven’t been born yet, but bear with me… Basically, we are living in the most exciting time for media next to the days of Gutenberg himself. We are living on the forefront of some incredible innovation and I wanna be a part of it! Mobile, web, interactivity, blurring the lines of virtual and real–all these things are happening and they might be great for society.

At SXSW Jane McGonigal talked a lot about happiness. She read the same stuff I did about Positive Psychology when I was working at Laureate. Fascinating stuff. Anyway, she created an online game called World Without Oil that ended up winning a bunch of awards. It’s an Alternate Reality Game (ARG) that posed the question: “What if there was a national oil crisis? How you you survive?” Gamers created alternate realities by blogging, making videos, comics, photos essays, you name it about their experience in this fictional situation. The idea was to play the GAME so we could learn for the real future. Now THAT’S entertainment with a mission. But it also brings us back to ourselves and to each other. I think that the internet, while it originally took us away from each other, is now bringing us back. Chat, Live streaming video, mobile–all these things are bringing us closer to each other again. Virtual realities like email are the new universal, and Jane McGonigal, for one, is taking advantage of that.

Happiness Measure:
HIGH. I made a new friend yesterday and helped her with her huge amounts of bottles to be recycled.