Mark Pesce is one of my favorite media visionaries. Back in the late 1990s I was a big fan of Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML), which was co-invented by Mark. I proposed using it as a tool for concept representation, among other applications. Mark has since focused largely on the media space, doing some great work. I wrote about a report on IPTV by Mark last year, and his insights at a conference on public affairs we both spoke at a month or two ago.
Mark will be speaking at our forthcoming Future of Media Summit 2008 in a couple of weeks on the Future of TV and Video panel, which will be run between Silicon Valley and Sydney. I’m particularly looking forward to this panel, which will uncover how existing broadcast and cable TV is intersecting TV and video on the Internet to form an entirely new landscape.
Mark spoke earlier this week at the Personal Democracy Forum in New York. A review of the event in The Huffington Post described Mark as “the best speaker at PDF”. A brief excerpt:
In the morning the digital ethnologist Mark Pesce gave a bracing corrective to crowd wisdom. Speaking from a sociological and philosophical perspective, Pesce talked about the hyper connectivity that the internet provides. We are being asked to believe this will help political campaigns, he said. We are asked to believe things and politics will be different. “Bullshit.” Under an iconic image of Barack Obama, Pesce’s PowerPoint presentation showed YES WE CAN HAS. In other words, the fact that Barack Obama now has over a million friends on Facebook (mentioned frequently at PDF) may not be such a happy portent.
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