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This week I speak with author, futurist, and strategist Jessica Clark of Dot Connector Studio today. Jessica has honed her skills for decades on a path that’s carried her from AAAS to The Library of Congress to The Encyclopedia Britannica to the Center for Media and Social Impact to The New America Foundation to The Association of Independents in Radio and beyond, and now she oversees a refuge for social innovators working at the intersections of philanthropy, media, arts and culture, and futurism. We need dot connectors more than ever if we are to trace the shape of what’s emerging, and I look to Jessica as an example of how to weave research, experience design, production, strategy, and culture-building into something like the raft we need to make our way through vast uncertainty to thriving futures just over the horizon. In this episode we discuss the ideas shared in her book with Kamal Sinclair, Making A New Reality: A Toolkit for Inclusive Futures and how to rethink storytelling in new media.
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Chapters
0:00:00 - Teaser
0:01:40 - Intro
0:07:51 - Who is Jessica Clark?
0:10:42 - “New Media” Means New Kinds of “Reality”
0:15:18 - Storytelling & Social Power
0:25:07 - Overcoming Groupthink / Problems in The Creative Economy
0:32:39 - Fairness in New Media
0:40:38 - What Do We Measure While Incubating Creativity?
0:48:32 - Post-Institutional Credentials
0:55:01 - How Do We Support “The Interstitionaries”?
1:02:14 - Intergenerational Wisdom & The Value of Conflict to Truth
1:08:59 - What Biases Do We Want?
1:14:29 - The Future Voice of Fandom
1:18:03 - Acknowledgements & Next Guest
(Most) Mentions
Making A New Reality’s Toolkit for Change Resources
Kamal Sinclair & Jessica Clark discuss Making A New Reality
Victor Pickard’s “We Need a Media System That Serves People’s Needs, Not Corporations’”
William Deresiewicz’s “The Death of the Artist—and the Birth of the Creative Entrepreneur”
Ward Shelley’s Who Invented The Avant Garde Redux, 2020
Michael Garfield’s “An Oral History of The End of ‘Reality’”
Doug Rushkoff
Sep Kamvar
Julie Ann Crommett
Stephanie Lepp
Ari Kuschnir
Maureen Fan
Eugene Chung
Zebras Unite
Metalabel
Maureen Giovannini
Shannon Gilmartin
Nicole Anand
Ed Catmull
Leslie Fields Cruz
David Jay
Center for Humane Technology
William Irwin Thompson’s The American Replacement of Nature
C Thi Nguyen
Thomas Frank
Jennifer Brandel
Brian Eno
Tracy Van Slyke
The Center for Media & Social Impact
MIT Open Documentary Lab
Trista Harris
Patricia Aufderheide
Internet Archive
Wikimedia Foundation
Malka Older
Global Voices
Dark Trek
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