Colin Rhinesmith

I just returned from an exciting meeting with three other grad students and two new media faculty, Eric Gordon and John Craig Freeman, at Emerson College. The purpose was to get together and discuss how we might envision a location-based/networked forum for sharing our work and connecting on related projects.

The majority of grad students in the group are looking at issues related to Second Life and other sociable web platforms. I am particularly interested in how physical community media centers are using networked technology to connect and empower their communities (see blog). And our two faculty members are exploring a number of related issues, including the use of networked technology to augment live humanities events (see previous post).

Tonight was the first in a series of bi-monthly gatherings to explore common threads across each of our work and build a community of support for new media grads, moving forward (which I am very excited about). We spent a good deal of time trying to figure out how exactly to classify the work we’re all doing. We all agreed that each of our research interests skim across many related disciplines, but does not quite fit into any single discipline.

So we threw out a number of “terms” to see which might best describe our work collectively. One idea in particular seemed to catch on with the group. That was Net-Locality, an area that Eric Gordon has been exploring. We agreed that we’d sit with it and continue our conversation online.

With this group, I’m most excited about the opportunity to collaborate with other grad students and faculty on related topics and to learn from each other. I look forward to seeing what happens.

Education, Emerson College, Grad School, Social Networking Tools