The theme of our members-only Q1 2022 Working Group is “Monetization in the Metaverse”
Connect with experts, ask questions, and learn more about the NYC Media Lab & Verizon $1M Museum Initiative — a nationwide open call for museums, science centers, aquariums, zoos, and cultural institutions to develop and offer new edtech content on the Verizon Innovative Learning HQ portal.
https://schedule.sxsw.com/2022/events/PP1140735
With Disney Streaming, Amazon, and Netflix octupling down on content, and Discovery Inc and WarnerMedia merging into DiscoBros, Evan Schapiro - eshap - says it's a battle between creators and platforms.
The NYC Media Lab’s Executive Director Steven Rosenbaum will engage Shapiro in a crisp and often provocative conversation. As platforms like Apple TV and Netflix dig deep to spend huge dollars on content, will creators become little more than highly paid properties of the platforms they serve?
Shapiro is a mapmaker, and in this presentation of the battles ahead, Rosenbaum will endeavor to turn Shapiro’s maps into a guidebook for how creators can navigate their path toward a future as kings of content. Kings, or court jesters? That remains to be seen.
A Former Facebook Executive Pushes to Open Social Media’s ‘Black Boxes’
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/02/business/media/crowdtangle-facebook-brandon-silverman.html
Brandon Silverman’s last day at Facebook was Oct. 8, and like many others who have sold their companies to a Silicon Valley giant, had their shares vest and departed, he planned to take a year off to spend time with his children and figure out what to do next.
He had been at the social media giant since it acquired his start-up, CrowdTangle, in 2016. And he had watched that project, which tracks the content that draws attention on Facebook, emerge as perhaps the single most important window into what was actually happening on the megaplatform. But his project had increasingly become an irritant to his bosses, as it revealed the extent to which Facebook users engaged with hyperpartisan right-wing politics and misleading health information.
While Mr. Silverman no longer works at Facebook, he hasn’t quite left the company behind. Instead, he has spent the weeks since his exit working with a bipartisan group of U.S. senators on legislation that would, among other things, force the giant social media platforms to provide the sort of transparency that got him marginalized at Facebook.
“What’s happening right now, though, is that a few private companies are disseminating a massive amount of the world’s news and it’s largely happening inside black boxes,” Mr. Silverman told The NY Times.
In Feb and March, NYC Media Lab will be hosting free online info sessions where participants can learn more about our NFT & Blockchain Challenge.
A leading philosopher takes a mind-bending journey through virtual worlds, illuminating the nature of reality and our place within it.
Virtual reality is genuine reality; that’s the central thesis of Reality+. In a highly original work of “technophilosophy,” David J. Chalmers gives a compelling analysis of our technological future. He argues that virtual worlds are not second-class worlds, and that we can live a meaningful life in virtual reality. We may even be in a virtual world already.
Along the way, Chalmers conducts a grand tour of big ideas in philosophy and science. He uses virtual reality technology to offer a new perspective on long-established philosophical questions. How do we know that there’s an external world? Is there a god? What is the nature of reality? What’s the relation between mind and body? How can we lead a good life? All of these questions are illuminated or transformed by Chalmers’ mind-bending analysis.
On February 1 and 14, NYC Media Lab will be hosting free online info sessions where participants can learn more about our Music in the Metaverse Challenge.
