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Digital media and network technologies are now part of everyday life. The Internet has become the backbone of communication, commerce, and media; the ubiquitous mobile phone connects us with others as it removes us from any stable sense of location. Along with this, the public is transforming. The mass media and mass audience analyzed by the Frankfurt School are long past. Today we inhabit multiple, overlapping and global networks such as user forums, Facebook, Flickr, blogs, and wikis. The media industry which just a decade ago seemed well-established, is in flux, facing its greatest challenge ever. Our book, Networked Publics examines the ways that the social and cultural shifts created by these technologies have transformed our relationships to (and definitions of) place, culture, politics, and infrastructure.

Ze Frank's 2004 TED Talk is a discussion of online networking, social toys, and digital audience interaction in standup comedy format. It starts in a humorous, disjointed format similar to The Show, the vlog-a-day project which he created 2 years later. For a shorter, more serious discussion of the potential of online social spaces to give people novel opportunities to creatively express themselves, start at 14:00.

Ze Frank's more serious 2010 TED Talk, in which he discusses a number of past and recent projects and talks about the "life" lived in technological interactions, and the great potential for creating real social and emotional connections through online networks.

Buy real land in Detroit for $1 a square inch and join a network of inchvestors in the new 50,000 square inch Hello World microhood.

Some friends and I have a neighborhood there!