Beyond Broadcast: Dave Weinberger’s Close

I missed Dave Weinberger’s post about the closing talk he gave at Beyond Broadcast. I had a hard time taking notes during the short presentation – the result of a brain that was too full and fingers that were too tired. But I made a note about participatory culture and democracy and the concept of “ours” that I couldn’t parse afterward, until I came across Dave’s notes:

participatory culture is changing the nature and topology of ours. It’s ours in a different way. We can create works with strangers, with anonymous crowds, and in all the other ways we’re inventing. This is a very different sense of ours. And it’s not just that we can build Wikipedia or Flickr streams. We also get to make these works matter to one another: That we can surface and pass around the video or the prose so that it becomes a shared cultural object also changes the nature of the ours. 5. So, how does this new ours affect democracy? (And it’s more likely to affect democracy before it affects politics since those folks have a death grip on power.) How does this ours get turned into an us that operates politically? I dunno.

I like this idea of participatory culture strengthening the ties we have with other people – strangers or friends – and its potential to make us better citizens. Weinberger calls this his “failed talk” but it was actually quite good.