I walked down to Occupied Wall Street the other day. Just strolled right on down from Chinatown. I wanted to see it for myself. Not hear about it from my hard left facebook friends, or settle for tepid media coverage. Especially coverage from men and women in business casual clothing talking about what all this means. Like they were even trying to understand it.

So I walked down to see it for myself.

The northeast is wonderful this time of year. This is truly the great season. When the fall gives you one of those bright clear days in October, you seize it. Far too often I watch through the glass of the office window, a passing mirage of sheer meteorological pleasure.

But when I walked down to Wall Street, I was firmly seizing the moment and the season. The weather was right and no further sense of professional responsibility was going to keep me in check.

First came the barricades. There were barricades everywhere. They were casually thrown up on sidewalks and in front of Dunkin’ Donuts. I was sure the heart of the political beast was around the corner, and felt a distinct twinge of fear as I imagined citizens with unchecked anger calling me out for merely passing through.

But I simply couldn’t find Liberty Plaza. So I took a corner near City Hall and there they were: at least two thousand people of all walks of life streaming across the Brooklyn Bridge.

They were clad in multicolored shirts and holding illuminated balloons. As they streamed across the bridge, dusk fell over Manhattan creating the most serene and majestic testament to peace and human unity.

I got closer. This truly was a middle class movement. Here were the ninety-nine percent in action: families, the elderly, school children. All were here.

Then I noticed something odd. They were being ushered across the street by volunteers in blue t-shirts with the words Barclay’s Capital plastered on the backs. The balloons too were branded. This wasn’t Occupy Wall Street. This was a walk for Leukemia! And god damn it was beautiful .

I pushed through the hordes of cancer protesters to get further south. There were dejected looking Wesleyan students coming against me. In there hands were hand-painted signs. Surely the protest was nigh!

On my right, the 9/11 memorial opened up. Goodness why has no one in the news thought it fit to mention how close the protests are to Ground Zero?! Perhaps that’s just a political nightmare waiting to unfurl. Perhaps it’s simply that in New York, everything is next to something else significant and historic.

The occupation was dark and feral. There were cops everywhere around the narrow park. But inside, the benches and fountains had been totally re-invented. It was what political theorist Hakim Bey once called a Temporary Autonomous Zone. Though the park is flanked by police and office buildings of banking firms, these people in the heart of Liberty Plaza believe they are a part of something new and different: they believe they are in the bosom of a new democracy.

Signs littered the pavement. You could comb through to pick the message you believed it and hoist it up for the world to see. That’s been the supposed problem with these protests: no unified message. But standing there with the signs before me, I felt that democracy does indeed work best when it looks like this. A hundred people willing to stand for something they believe in, or at least, listen to someone else who does.

This post was originally published in the Newport Mercury as a part of my ongoing column “Every 7 Seconds” 

Friends meet and walk off, dogs scurry by, students gather and gossip, musicians sit down to strum a melody.

The table is tagged with graffiti and often sprinkled with fall leaves. But a sweep of the table is all you need to make it playable.

And playing there, well, playing there is among the greatest pastimes in the world. Let the great world spin- you will care only for the motion of the small ball. It’s harder to push in the open air, with even slight breeze affecting its transit. So you play it safe and rallies abound. The games expand and excite. They are far better than indoor games.

The world becomes a blur that becomes a powerful sensory game plane. For you can smell the trees and the grass, and you hear dogs yelping at play, and kids squealing in the playground.  But you cannot notice them lest the spell break and the game fail to be all-engrossing. For against and within the life of a relentless New York, the ping pong game becomes something else at that stone table in Tompkins Square Park.

Play, Johan Huizinga once wrote, is older than human culture because animals have not waited for man to teach them to play.  All great games rekindle this essential truth, for in play, an absolute freedom and single-mindedness emerges. Play, at its best, collapses us into a primal self in which we are not lost to irrationality, but allowed to revel in the co-construction of joy and purpose.

There is a magic ping pong table in Tompkins Square Park, where playing transforms the players. And all you need is a small ball, two cheap paddles, and a half hour. Nirvana is a racquet game.

A huge show of iPhoneography in London will open this weekend. It’s a watershed moment in the history of both photography broadly and iPhoneography in particular. Though hardly the first show to celebrate the aesthetic and cultural implications of a world instagrammed, the exhibition brings iPhoneography to the ultimate stage: recognition as an art form in a capital of world culture and politics.

The show holds massive personal significance for me because it fulfills many of the observation and analyses put forward by my Master’s research at Cambridge. Recently, that research was profiled by the University of Cambridge itself as part of its official portfolio of University scholarship. But far more importantly, the show is the work of several good friends who I met on a beautiful spring evening in London nearly six months ago. At that meeting, almost all of us were strangers to one another, bound together only by a passion and a network. From that niche moment to this triumphant exhibition, one can see an culture in rapid growth. A small photograph of that first Instameet (above), now a who’s who of the London Instagram/iPhoneography world, is stained perfectly with a sepia petina, suggesting my own nostalgia and pride at this fascinating moment.

Brooklyn is a likewise an abstraction. What it meant in the nineties, defined by Spike Lee and Biggie, has been pushed aside by a host of hipsters and posturers. Finding New York necessary but uninhabitable, they settled on the island off-island, and began writing careers leading them (hpefully) towards Malcolm Gladwell or Jonathan Lethem or n+1 semi-notoriety.

They revel in the semi-obscurity of Brooklyn, which Brooklyn being the second borough, gladly revels back in.

I went to Brooklyn for an art show. Not a Brooklyn art show mind you. This was not an arts organization’s tribute to the chetto through found photography. This was something proven and contemporary, an arts movement in the true sense of the term: it wants to go somewhere.

Digital art has been ill-defined since its inception. This is because it’s characteristics are only its media, which are themselves far too unconstrained to suggest any mission or impetus. Digital art, from my understanding, is that which unmasks, re-invents, exploits, advances, celebrates, and critiques digital technology. It is an offering of what will come and what we have already forgotten. Digital art is a media critique offered in the truest manner: through the media itself.

Two years ago, sitting on the steps of the Ars Electronica pavilion in Linz, Austria, I confronted a microcosm that had rendered digital art cohesive. The Europeans, being ever enlightened, had found a way to make the One Laptop Per Child project, WikiLeaks, Processing, Pixar, and Graffiti Research Lab into a single movement. Their technique was curation. It you hail it, it loosely coheres.

But in the wilds of culture, particularly in the feral cultural landscapes of New York, digital art willfully resists such unity. It’s bits, after all, share little in terms of agenda or belief. Only aestheticians can overlook ideology for effect, bringing disparate elements together.  So this Brooklyn art show, called Nuit Blanche, after European precedents, focused on a single digital art form: light art.

Light art, or more formally projection art, reinvents the night as a found opportunity for intervention. It follows a certain modern assumption: that the night is chaos, and that light is order and narration. It finds the built environment as a playful forum for re-invention, much like the space-hacking principles of skateboarding, graffiti, or parkour. Light art is marked by its mobility, its powerful reach, and its transience. The art will not be there in the morning. It may not even remain consistent for a few instants. Light art is unheavy. Light art is fundamentally about the strangeness of living spaces made into cinematic and into televisual receptacles.

At Nuit Blanche, I wandered with Colleen through hordes of awed and amazed visitors. It was the most successful art show I had ever attended in that it

•  required no introduction, no wall text, no rsvp, no explanation
•   it’s transience was self-evident in the art itself, one had to savor each piece because it was clear one could never return
•  it immediately indicted the very technologies that produced its effects, begging one to look for the projector or shadow maker, or computer rigging
•  it’s relationship with it’s space was direct and essential, most unlike the one-size fits all attitude of white wall gallery art
•  it’s strangeness felt like the future, and simultaneously like an unconsidered present

Projection art does best what all digital art should do: it asks us to reconsider the present as an ideal permutation of the cultures and technologies we have available.

Re-purposing Brooklyn, playing on its abstraction and imagining its projection, this art show proved a moment equally surreal and lucid. It is a dream of art made public and practical, contributing to the public good a vision and a hope that no (Richard Serra) corporate sculpture can ever accomplish in the name of purpose and idealism.

I’m fascinated by Dutch Manhattan. I like imagining it’s wooden homes and windmills. I am stunned by its perceived closeness with the Lenape tribe, the very people whose primal Manhattan identity has been all but obliterated by the city. I romanticize pre-New York as something manageable and intimate. An experience peeking out from monuments and hidden in urban details of the modern metropolis.

This makes Manhattan more human to me. More human and fundamental. Seeing a New York when it was New (Amsterdam) resonates deeply with my own newness to this island with my off-the-boat awe and its new world grandeur, openness, and prospect.

Since the week before Labor day, I’ve been in NY working as the Community Manager at Piictu. It’s a social photography start-up that fits in wonderfully with my love for creativity and technology. We’re based in Union Square for the next month or so, as the team completes the ambitious TechStars program. Work is a joyous blur. I put in 10-11 hour shifts without noticing. Some days we listen in on product pitches for tech products of yesteryear. Other days we take advice from ex-CEO’s of major businesses telling us what they wish they had been told. There are lunches with VC groups and open bars for TV events (which happen to be about TechStars in NYC). It is the most dynamic and frontline situation I could have wound up in, and I’m absolutely loving it.

Evenings and weekends offer little in reprieve. Manhattan is where nights run away with people. If I’m not careful, an afterwork drink because a romp through Ft. Greene Brooklyn, or a few rounds of pool in an obscure part of Chinatown.

My first months in Manhattan have been spent in the Upper East Side, crashing with good friends near 86th and Lexington. The prime position allows 15 minute express access to werk, and easy ambulation to Central Park, that most mythic and enchanted of American backyards. Last week, I realized an ancient fantasy from Stuart Little and rented a model sailboat on Conversatory Water. The breeze was a touch light, but my allotted half hour flew by as I got the hang of darting across the pond, tacking in wide, fast reaches.

September rushes by. The skyline grows more familiar as I find New York’s habits and hustle more predictable. I am stitching its cultural postcards together to form a united, mythology for myself: A McCune’s Gotham.

This is the Upper West Side, here’s the Hudson. This is Lincoln Center, shall we find a cheap show? This is Wall Street, why is it so empty and inhuman? This is Chinatown, where I buy ancient coins from a street vendor 3 for $2.

If you walk halfway across the Brooklyn Bridge, at sunset, you can see the torch on Lady Liberty sparkle out on the sea. Meanwhile, the Bridge’s imposing arches will make clear that it’s architect imagined the future of the city as an intimidating neo-gothic expanse, heavy with stone and peaked Cathedral keystones. It never happened. Rampant modernism clad the city in glass and steel, raising her financial stellae towards the heavens, cloaking them in color, filling them with new jazz sounds.

And now, a new age in Manhattan opens, on the very same bedrock into which the Dutch first shook hands with the Lenape promising a stability that a sleepless city will never deliver. I imagine that handshake like the splitting of an atom (the Manhattan Project after all, an inextricable part of this same island) in which the meeting of old and new released an impossible energy the world is still infected by: the inevitability of New York City.

Users, of course, have always been a part of the tech world, and there’s no denying that their tastes, opinions, and preferences have been business and design concerns for some time. But if the Air BnB scandal teaches us anything powerful, it should be that not all users are equal.  It can be said, somewhat reductively, that there are “good users” and “bad users.” The tech world needs to get serious about cultivating good users and avoiding bad users by consciously understanding the people who use and create their products. The reason is simple: good users empower companies, while bad users (looking at your AirBnB) can threaten and destabilize great projects.

:: virtues of the good user

Good users are defined by their commitment to a network, their respect for other users, and their supportiveness of new users. Good users help networks grow quickly but also securely. They are not like rats looking for an easy feast and then moving on when a product’s newness and trendiness has been exhausted.

Like good neighbors, good users are committed to the virtual community that today’s social media and web 2.0 businesses promise. They believe in a set of values (almost always unwritten) that form the heart of acceptable behavior in online spaces. They are also motivated by a love of the network and what it creates, be it photos, stories, videos, restaurant reviews, or places to stay. Good users have meet-ups, share skills, compliment other users, and give constructive criticism to company developers and fellow users alike. Good users take ideas well and enjoy thinking up ways to improve a work-flow or set of tools. Good users are the core of tech business that will succeed when the age of a-startup-a-minute crashes down. Good users will help companies solve their own problems and even monetize their products because they will believe in the network. They will be invested in it. They will be committed to it.

:: vices of the bad user

Bad users bully. Bad users stake out territory and intimidate rather than instruct new users. Bad users look for ways to take advantage of everything and everyone. Bad users may help a network grow quickly, but insecurely because bad users are temperamental and capricious. They do not invest in a community, they exploit it. Bad users are looking for forms of virtual power rather than community. They seek audiences rather than peers. They set up hierarchies to protect their anxieties and support their egos. They criticize others harshly, they do not take criticism themselves.

Users matter. Not simply because they are customers, but because they create the very content that has constitutes the objects and activities that define social media today. The brilliance of YouTube or Vimeo are not the sites’ designs and functionality although they certainly inform user behavior. The brilliance is the content users create and share. YouTube and Vimeo are like open cinema spaces: Vimeo ends up being more art-house, while YouTube brings any type of content, blockbuster FAILs and family films alike.

Users matter. They reshape and create. They thrive in certain circumstances and abandon sites that begin constraining them. Users cannot be a secondary concern of tech companies, but too often that’s exactly what they are. While it’s easy to find the engineers of a product, or the designers of a site, the user liaisons are often only hired later in a company’s development. But that’s absurd. If you are building a technology that relies on users, you need to have user research and co-ordination running in parallel to coding and designing. Because this is not customer service, it’s product development and customer service and strategy rolled into one. In web 2.0, the users are not just the content “customers,” but also the indispensable content “creators.”

Users are not just the future of successful technology, they’re the present.

:: This analysis will continue with case studies in good and bad users and how they impact a media company’s networks

• I used the app for four-weeks, interacting with other users and sharing images
• I traveled to London for the first Instagram meetup in the UK, talking with users IRL (in real life)
• I collected 23 open response questionnaires from users in the UK and around the world

Then I wrote an 80-page dissertation and turned it in.

So much good research stops right there. Project complete, research finished, product typed and handed to the right people, a scholar may move on to new ideas and inquires.

But I didn’t want this project to stop there. I wanted it to have life- to circulate among other academics and especially among the people who are making and defining social media – USERS. So I distilled the results into a five page executive summary and began emailing blogs pitching my research as a story. I had discovered six common motivations for Instagram use across all of the responses. I had undertaken an academic study of a technology not even a year old at one of the world’s oldest universities. I must have emailed 30 or so different targets before the responses started coming in. The go-to unofficial blog of Instagram users, Instagramers.com, published a round-up of the report. A post at AppFreak followed, focusing on why social interactions are among the most ‘addicting’ apps. Then the story exploded on The Next Web site, as over 200 people tweeted a post about my research, and the summary received over 2,000 reads in just a day. People began messaging and emailing me about the piece following up on aspects of the research, questions relevant to their own research, or invitations to participate in fabulous online discussions like one at Theory Thursday.

Within three weeks of publishing the dissertation, over 5,000 people had read it.

I measured this as an immense success against the general experience of Master’s dissertations languishing in departmental libraries ad infinitum. The point is, though the subject of my dissertation really lent itself to internet promotion, students and researchers must find the time to really push and promote their work. This is no vanity and though challenging (emailing endlessly) it will probably be the most rewarding part of a research project as the study will gain life and its own agency. There’s no telling where your work will go when you let out into the world, but isn’t that better than knowing the few places it resides?

Post-Script: About two weeks ago, I received my marks, which were far, far higher than I had expected. Earning a distinction on the dissertation was an immense, unexpected honor. Even more stunning was being told that this had ensured my degree was awarded “with distinction.” I am still happier to receive the odd email from a stranger asking a follow-up question from reading the summary online.

Drawing on my previous work (scholastic and personal) in social media spaces like YouTube, SoundCloud, Vimeo, and Twitter, I’ve decided to examine why consumers share what used to be private media content with the world. This is a unique question, because most of the dialog about social media is in the is-it-good or is-it-bad binary, and I feel that in ignoring users directly and interrogating their motivations for production, scholarship and journalism have lost an opportunity. Are YouTubers aspiring filmmakers? Or home movie makers just looking to share memories with friends and family? Are SoundClouders recording for posterity (archiving) or promotion (listen to this man!) ?

For my research, I’ve decide to look at the iPhone app Instagram to see what powers a burgeoning photo-sharing social media network. I presented a more detailed outline of my methods, motivations, and research goals to the department last week.

Here’s the Prezi:

And the recording of the presentation, complete with a friend calling me a humanist (true!):

Zachary McCune presents on Consumer Media Production by zmccune

The Irish became Irish-American. Boston got a basketball team that paid homage to its yankee Brahmins being outpaced by celtic people. Catholic churches proliferated widely. And Newport, itself an emerald isle of sorts, gained a swelling Irish population. The Irish were too poor to stay in Ireland. So they left for brighter shores, altering the shape and accent of history forever.
Now, in the spiraling chaos of the Recession, the Irish are again leaving home.

With unemployment in the Republic over 13%, more than 100,000 citizens expected to leave the country of 4 million in the next three years. They join a bittersweet history of exodus. From Ireland to the world, the Irish have given literature, entertainment, innovation and a celebrated sense of joi de vie best summarized by the (outrageous) Irish word craic meaning fun or a good time. Used in conversation “after the game the lads and I went to the pub for a bit of craic,” Americans can be forgiven for assuming drug use.

The Irish are going to need all the craic they can muster. After the economic collapse of Greece, the Irish have fallen need to a similarly dramatic bailout. Which ends the first, and now possibly only period of general wealth, growth and prosperity that ever occurred in Ireland. Termed the “celtic tiger” this economic force grew from the mid 90’s into years of glory in the early millenials. And now its come crashing down.

Where will the Irish go?

Can they afford to join us in the America again? We’ve enough of our problems to manage- where will they fit in?
Can they go to Europe or the UK, the places they traditionally gone to for short stints to improve their economic viability? Not in a time when Europe is reeling from the very collapse that sends the Irish deep into its heart.

So the Irish must go to places more unlikely. Australia and New Zealand have been suggested, but I wonder if there is not something more dramatic and fascinating to emerge. Will, for instance, the Irish follow the wealth in the world to China or Brazil or India? Those are the developing nations whose growth requires some guidance. And English is already a valorized skill in those countries. Will the Irish teach English to a new generation of students abroad, bringing the playful Irish version of the language with them, fulfilling the promise of Becket, Yeats, and Joyce in Beijing and Delhi? Or might the Irish adopt and entwine themselves into new contexts, creating unique intercultural realities so fresh and unexpected we can scarcely imagine their characteristics?

One might hope so. Especially as the Irish look down at decades of debt and unemployment and collapsed confident. Now more than ever, the world needs the Irish to remember their mirth and craic, if only for themselves.

Zachary McCune asked a man in Ireland what his son’s future would hold. The response had something to do with “abroad” and was said with a smile and a tear.

[ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN THE NEWPORT MERCURY]

Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks.org knows and understands what Brand was talking about. His site has not only become world (in)famous, it is done so by dealing in information. It makes “free” what others believe is quite “expensive.” It makes public what was private, problematicizing privacy in the already slippery age of cloud computing and trust in computer networks. So much of what was once physically kept personal has bee electronically made ubiquitous, and in the process privacy itself as become as easy to sneak around as the familiar command “copy-paste.”

Julian Assange has become a sort of villain. He does not photograph well, looking at once sad, sickly, and sinister. His motives unclear, most Americans take his actions at face value: in releasing hundreds of thousands of secret American documents, Assange alienates a fundamental American right to … what is it actually that he’s done illegally?

Remember Watergate? That was this historical episode when an American president tried to conceal illegal actions with intimidation, money, and aspirations to American patriotism. Two journalists stuck to the case and in the process became American heroes, far more patriotic than the “patriots” who had tried to protect the president with lies and threats. These men would be played by Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford in a film that made their dogged sense of “freeing information” into a sort of patriotic virtue. The implications of the film and the event itself were that there is nothing to fear about the truth if you are among the just and responsible. Nixon wasn’t.

I met Julian Assange in Austria, at a digital festival in an opera house overlooking the Danube. It was the fall of 2009, and he was in Austria to receive an award from the Ars Electronica Festival for his contributions to public discourse. Assange gave a speech in which he never smiled and never laughed, but talked instead about the need to give people around the world a safe way to share information that the world needed to know. He saw himself and his organization as more of a technology of protecting those who would share secrets than a political statement on secrets.

But his ideology was powerful and unmistakable. A former journalist, inspired by Woodward and Bernstein, Assange had begun WikiLeaks to protect the “deep throats” of today and tomorrow. He expressed a hope that the information that wanted to be free could be. And of couse, that it should be. He was prepared to go to all lengths for this conviction.

A year later, we now know that Assange has gone to all lengths for this conviction. He has been labeled a “terrorist,” has been criticized by world governments, has been implicated in several court cases, and most sadly, attacked by journalists and news organizations themselves. Assange’s dour disposition is nothing more than the frank understanding that despite the freedom he has given information, we refuse to be liberated by it.

Zachary McCune will not stand for the witch trial of a man who actually forces accountability in the golden age of the unaccountable.

[ Printed in this week's Newport Mercury ]