By crashing through this mass, public experiment with AI, we may actually spur more reflection on our own humanity. What is art, and who is the artist?

I never thought I would become addicted to something like Midjourney, an AI image generator that allows users to create highly realistic and customizable images of people, places, and things. That's exactly what I began to see happening though, but only because I’ve become sensitive to the ways that technologies can hook us.

This article is a continuation from Audience Engagement: The Making of Meaning. The goal is to strategically design better audience experiences centered on media. To this end I provide a breakdown of the white paper, Making Sense of Audience Engagement. In my previous article I covered the Arc of Engagement and Impact Echo; now I will review the authors’ breakdown of Audience Typologies and The Audience Engagement Cycle as a way forward.

SUMMARY: “Engagement is a unifying philosophy that brings together marketing, education and artistic programming in common service of maximizing impact.” (Brown & Ratzkin, 2011, p. 2)

SUMMARY: The goal of quality curation should be to create Audience Engagement that results in an Impact Echo. A new metric of success should be defined around when a piece of media gains Cultural Purchase.

Ever since Bitcoin came onto the scene in 2009, I have been generally skeptical of crypto currencies. While I tend to be an early adopter of new technologies, I was not the type to build a computer to mine the early Bitcoins. Later as it gained real value, it got swarmed by speculators and flippers attracting the Wall Street Bro types who became Crypto Bros. Bitcoin went from the digital equivalent of gold mining cultural, to the crypto version of stock exchange speculating and gambling, and neither interested me.