[artinfo] documentary about innovative community websites

[Stevenson, Michael]

Dear friends and colleagues,

I am very happy to announce the release of "Geeks in Cyberspace," a 
30-ish minute documentary that tells the story of the people who 
created Slashdot and other innovative community websites in the late 
1990s. It touches on themes of creativity, the mix of motivations 
that went into creating these sites, the subtle differences with 
later social media, and the link between community feelings of 
ownership and continued maintenance and preservation.

Here it 
is: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=deefSs5Qxz0>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=deefSs5Qxz0.

What started as a lo-fi attempt to capture 1 or 2 oral histories 
became a more ambitious and pro-am effort that has its flaws, but I 
am ultimately quite proud of. I hope it will be of use to interested 
researchers, professionals and perhaps in courses about social media 
and digital culture. If you do want to show it in the classroom, 
please note there will also be an accompanying article on 
<http://opensource.com/>opensource.com, but somehow the timing got 
messed up and it's not up yet.

I'm interested in doing more documentary work in the future, so any 
thoughts, feedback or ideas about collaboration are very welcome.

And of course if you would like to share it with colleagues you think 
would be interested or via your social media channels, I'd be 
grateful.

Thanks!
-Michael


Michael Stevenson
Associate Professor
Media Studies
University of Amsterdam
<mailto:m.p.stevenson at uva.nl>m.p.stevenson at uva.nl
<http://twitter.com/_mstevenson>http://twitter.com/_mstevenson
Publications: <https://hcommons.org/members/mstevenson/>https://hcommons.org/members/mstevenson/