If you don't know who is Mark Pesce and/or have never heard of HyperPolitics, go read the whole lecture on his blog RIGHT NOW!.

Then come back and watch the videos that, albeit incomplete and a bit jerky, really give you a good idea of how incredibly important is Mark's framing of community development as it happens through mobile technology and the web.

Now, let me tell you what's turned me on about Mark's presentation :

What I most appreciate about his concept of Hyperpolitics is that it doesn't take the importance of human evolution out of the development and/or demand for new mobile and networked communication technologies. It's not that he "biologizes" our technological progression.

What he does is to look at the internet, at social media, at mobile phones not as triumphs of a transhuman, and a-historical capitalism. What I get out of Pesce's work is that our advances in media technologies are human, all too human expressions of our individual and collective need for communication, community and self-expression.

We need to understand media technology and their use in politics as an extension of a primal need to bond and yet be distinct. It's by understanding that primal need and how we humans have historically scratched that itch that we can then posit what the future may hold with these new ways of communicating, socializing, organizing and just simply being through media. And it's how we can then learn how to parse the truly innovative from, ahem, the bullshit (in re : Wikipedia and the Obama campaign).

WATCH IT!

READ IT!

DISCUSS IT!