PopTech attendees send a cautionary signal to mainstream news publications

This column appeared Oct. 24, 2002, in the Online Journalism Review. Here’s the version on the OJR site.

By J.D. Lasica

Late last week, while the Online News Association held its annual conference in New York, a handful of online journalists headed to a different kind of conclave, trekking to a scenic coastal village in Maine for PopTech, the annual gathering of Internet deep thinkers and technology heavy hitters.

In between sessions, I asked some of the participants their views about the state of online journalism, the news sites they frequent, and their digital news habits. (For more on PopTech, see Dan Gillmor’s coverage and related photos.)

If the digerati gathered here represent the leading edge of the Internet Age, reflecting where our wired society may be headed a few years hence, then online news publications have their work cut out. Few of the early adapters in this crowd spend much time at mainstream news sites.

Here are off-the-cuff ruminations about online news from eight PopTech founders, speakers and attendees:

Jaron Lanier

Tech cred: Coined the term “virtual reality.” His company, VPL Research, was the first to introduce immersive virtual reality products.  Lead scientist of the National Tele-Immersion Initiative, a coalition of research universities studying applications for Internet2.
Lives: New York, San Francisco Bay Area

Apart from my time driving in my car, the Internet is my only source of news, and it has been for some time. There isn’t any one news site that I would be willing to depend on by itself. I think it’s important to look at the Internet as a whole as a news source, and some sites make up for the others’ failings. I try to find sources from other points of view, from other countries.

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Center for Digital Storytelling helps people hold up a lens to their own lives

This column appeared Oct. 8, 2002, in the Online Journalism Review. Here’s the version on the OJR site.

By J.D. Lasica

Kiok Gruttend, an emergency room nurse at Kaiser Permanente, sat nervously at the pockmarked table as a dozen strangers sat and waited. “Pardon,” she said, “my English not too good.” Her fingers trembled slightly as she began reading her two-minute script.

Gruttend told of her upbringing in South Korea, of her marriage to a Swiss man, of her yearning for a diploma, of the frailties of an immigrant family in Marin County. By the time she finished, more than a few eyes were moist.

“Good, good. Now let’s hear some ideas on how to refine Kiok’s script.” Joe Lambert, director of the Center for Digital Storytelling in Berkeley, Calif., scanned the room.

To Kiok’s right, Ruby Wilson had signed up for the workshop to create a piece honoring the life of a 96-year-old friend. M.K. Bryant, a self-described retired parent, came to document the stories we tell each other over meals at funerals, weddings, celebrations. Don Jones, who works for a Toronto company that creates simulated learning environments, clutched the lyrics of “Moon River” and would later tell how he sang the song as a lullaby to his now-grown children when they were very young.

The premise of the center is simple: We all have a powerful story to tell. And so these 12 individuals gathered for the three-day workshop to put together short, personal films from a point of view not often permitted in the field of journalism: first-person singular.

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The man who coined the term ‘virtual reality’ discusses art, science and life in the post-Sept. 11 world

“If there’s a world in which my personal details are more available to people and I have less privacy, I’m willing to accept that if the same standard applies to corporations and the government and celebrities and whoever else is in a protected status right now.”

Jaron Lanier — artist, scientist, visionary, and coiner of the term “virtual reality” — spoke by cell phone with J.D. Lasica from a café in Tribeca, New York, on Oct. 4, 2002, in advance of the PopTech conference in Camden, Maine.

The PopTech program teases us with your presentation by saying only, A Musical Experience With Virtual Reality. What should we expect?

Oh, my, that’s news to me. There is a thing I do sometimes which involves using some of the equipment from virtual reality research and stage performance, and I try to make virtual worlds that are themselves musical instruments in some way or have instruments in them. It’s fun, and it works on stage, but I’m struggling with this question of how to make creative tools for invention inside virtual worlds, and these instruments are, for me, the most familiar and appropriate metaphor to start with. However, I was not planning to do it in Maine, the reason being that it’s kind of a big production, and it’s expensive and involves a lot of equipment, and I had been thinking of this as a much simpler affair.

Some of the PopTech people saw me play my music at the World Economic Forum, the Davos meeting that was held in New York this year, where I played a duet with a wonderful percussionist named Will Calhoun. We’re trying to perform music that takes some of the elements of jazz, with extended instrumental improvisation, and combining that with some elements of electronic club music, but trying to get away from that genre’s repetitiveness. But let me say that that has nothing to do with virtual reality. I’d like to give a talk as well as perform, so maybe you could pass that request along.

I’ll do that. I know you’ve dabbled in Asian instruments as well. What other musical approaches have you tackled lately?

Unfortunately, to be a successful entertainer, you have to reduce the number of things you do so you can be described quickly and fit into people’s brains quickly so people know who you are. I have not made a decision to be an entertainer, I’m doing the artist thing more. I’ll have fewer people interested in me, and they’ll have to do more work to understand me. I play piano concerts, I do orchestral music, opera, soundtracks, really a wide variety.

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