Jumping into the deep end of the pool

So, I spent the day at the Message + Medium + Mission Conference in downtown Minneapolis today. I was able to learn about all the fun technologies that I have thought about using in the past, or different ways to use those I have used for a number of years. Flickr, Twitter, Various Google technologies, FaceBook, blogs and many other of the usual suspects were discussed at virtually every session. Hundreds of non-profit employees, board members, and volunteers got to see how the world is changing and how this new world's tools can be used to continue their mission's in cyberspace. I attended as a member of the Rainbow Rumpus Board of Directors, to see how these new shiny things can help us create a more interactive online community for kids of LGBT parents.

There is much more to the game now than having a website out there with a mission, staff roster, and a listing of programming. Many orgs employ online donation, blogging, galleries of photos, video clips, and streaming audio already and have done so for some time. The even newer technologies of RSS, Flickr, Twitter, social networking sites that seemingly are for the individual are being tapping into for to create powerful online fund raising campaigns, action alert networks, awareness building, and simply getting an org's existence out there for more of the world to see. Only now you can know when the org has reached a fund raising goal, is tabling at an event in another state, or when the Executive Director is out for a stroll around Lake Calhoun.

Organizations seem to be becoming more alive and organic than ever before, as you can friend an organization, know where its representatives are, and in some cases observe live video feeds on the work being done. I saw so many interesting uses of seemingly useless social tools that now I wonder, if Twitter can be useful, what can't be?

It was a great use of a day, and a big wake up call to seeing potential usefulness in spending more time with my laptop. Any way to justify that is priceless to a computer geek that spends too much time thinking about books, reading about computers, and now computing about people. Ah, to be a Social Science major!

Huh?

So Technocultural Anthropology eh? No not a typo or completely random mashing of words together this time, but rather, a fairly new area of academic study which is constantly being defined (even by me...right....now...). Basically this blog is something I have been thinking about doing for quite some time, and after a day of being immersed at a Technology and Communications Conference simply cannot put off any longer. I hope to look at how new technology is not only being used to create new cultures, but how the old offline cultures are interacting and being changed dramatically by emerging mediums. Additionally, I hope to explore how these new cultures which are largely digital in nature spill over to the non-digital world.
For a little more insight into Technoculture or the interactions between, and politics of, technology and culture simply go anywhere online or offline and take a step back and think about how the technology is affecting and shaping what you are observing. I will mostly be focusing on how online technologies are creating new and interesting communities and how these communities are ever-changing and also changing the places they touch, digital and non-digital alike.