Four days unplugged? LOL … RU crazy? not for a dozen communications students at Seattle University who recently attempted a 96-hour “media deprivation” experiment.
This self-imposed media Isolation Tank wasn’t exclusively Internet-based. Students also opted-out of listening to iPods or car radios, or checking e-mail, or chatting on cellphones. Of course, there was no surfing Web sites such as MySpace or Facebook. But the terrarnauts were also prohibited from watching “Desperate Housewives” or “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.”
The premise behind professor Mara Adelman’s thesis: The art of alone time is increasingly lost in our hectic, frazzled, wired lives.
“The silence was deafening,” said junior Cheryl Lee, 20. “You have to get comfortable with just listening to yourself and your thoughts because there’s nothing to keep you distracted.”
Lee said her undoing came with her cellphone, which she switched to vibrate and mostly left at home, but which she couldn’t face turning off altogether.
“There’s some things that need to still be communicated via the cellphone,” she said. [24×7] CrossCut to Cross the NW Online Divide March 12thThe Seattle Weekly’s founding editor plans to launch an online Northwest “newspaper” next month.David Brewster said the site, Crosscut, is tentatively scheduled to make its public debut March 12.
Brewster said he has lined up hundreds of thousands of dollars in startup financing from more than a dozen “civic-minded” Seattle-area investors.
He has enlisted two other Seattle Weekly veterans to work on the venture.
Former Weekly Managing Editor Chuck Taylor will be Crosscut’s editor. Knute “Skip” Berger, the Weekly’s former editor-in-chief, will write for the publication.
Brewster, who will be publisher, said Crosscut’s content will be a mix of original journalism, blogs, material derived from the mainstream media and other sources, and forums and other interactive features.
The site, at crosscut.com, will cover Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana and parts of British Columbia. [24×7]
Microsoft Vanishing Point Earn Visible Results
When Microsoft decided to launch a viral marketing campaign around its Windows Vista operating system, it wanted a spectacle that could catch fire among Internet fans.
It turned to an Internet marketing agency that has a track record for such stunts: 42 Entertainment, a start-up in Seattle and Emeryville that is full of video-game developers, puzzle freaks, toy makers and even fashion designers. These are the people who, more than most marketers in the world, understand the entertainment potential of the Internet.
he Vanishing Point game started in December and took off in a big way at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Clues included messages hidden in a Bill Gates speech, a light show that used the fountains outside the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas as a canvas for clues, skywritten messages above four cities, coded images projected onto the walls of various monuments and a fireworks extravaganza with a secret message in the skies above Seattle. The winner who solved the puzzle first, 29-year-old computer technician William “Will” Temple of Sacramento, won a trip into space on a private rocket. [24×7]
