Julian Bleecker is a well-known man to the Internets my search on Flickr for a portrait of him yielded over 500 results (photo snatched from Ti.mo's photostream).

This might be because of his manifold activities in the realm of electronic media, including teaching at USC's Interactive Media Division, blogging at Techkwondo, writing manifestos about Why Things Matter, lecturing about the CO2 production of avatars, researching the near future with accomplice Nicolas Nova or his stereoscopic collection of funny bikes.

Time for an interview to find out about the bigger picture and where it all might lead to in that near future.

Julian, what does a blogject do differently from an object?

Well, a blogject is like an object with social tendencies, worldly. It wants to be more than inert, more than a physical object. It has a tendency to be unique and contribute to conversations in specific, situated contexts. And they do this because they are net-savvy, and know all about the latest and greatest of sharing and circulating information in the connected world.

Objects - the more inert cousin of blogjects - aren't necessarily net-savvy. They certainly are social in lots of meaningful ways. You can get an object that inspires very social action, conversations or activities - a board game or well-designed chair, for instance. Blogjects can be as socially engaged as objects, only they do so with the full-force and power of what digital content dissemination techniques provide - feeds, aggregation, tagging, etc.

Blogjects are social in the way they address topics of concern. They're clever machines, but not artificial intelligences. They're like a lens on the physical, 1st life world, taking advantage of the wonderful world of sensor technologies. Blogjects are objects for wired, digitally networked societies. Over time, they'll become responsible for laminating 1st life and 2nd life in meaningful ways. And I think the ultimate responsibility is to force awareness of life- and world-threatening issues. At their best, blogjects make us aware of the unfolding tragedies that surround us everyday. And their power comes from the ability of their insights to circulate at the speed of the network.

Laminating the lives is an interesting point. Let's look a bit more closely at the current interactions between those worlds: so we have objects with social qualities, thanks to their net-savviness. On the other hand - so it seems - there's a movement to create the virtual realities we had been told about for decades, with Linden Lab's Philip Rosedale talking about "digitizing everything". Are those two discrete notions, or are they part of one process and if so, what kind of reality would it possibly lead to?

I think this notion of digitizing everything is a bit misguided. It presumes that most everything should be digital, without consideration as to what it means to have particular human experiences or activities transferred into digital form. It's a kind of digital-era imperialism or evangelization of the database gospel - "if it can be structured as data, put it on the Internets" - or something. It has so many things wrong about it, beginning with a lack of any sort of critical inquiry as to what it means, or why one would think it worth while, for instance, to have make digital shopping malls in Second Life.

If the project of the digital age is to make everything that we have in "1st life" available in 2nd life, then I think we're on the wrong path. Laminating 1st life and 2nd life isn't about creating digital analogs. It's about elevating human experience in simple and profound ways. This blogject project is an early manifestation of what I think we will start seeing as clever tinkerers experiment with creating meaningful bridges between 1st life and 2nd life in which ethics precedes doing something "just 'cause" it's possible. And those bridges come firstly in very simple expressions of 1st life activity in 2nd life, or 2nd life activity in 1st life.

Bruce Sterling has a great turn-of-phrase I once heard him speak - "we will get the future we deserve." And in this case it means if we want Gap Stores, shopping malls and advertising signage in Second Life, that's what we'll get. But I think many people want something that will yield more habitable worlds, not more efficient ways to market and get people to buy crap. We could create impacts and shape thinking and behavior with digital networks, particularly ones that speak to 1st life. We can create bridges that capture, share and disseminate the current, day by day state of the thinning northern ice cap. We can create a 1st life / 2nd life bridge that makes this condition as present, as impactful and as resonant as a dripping faucet in the next room, rather than an abstraction only occasionally brought to our mind through a newspaper article or cocktail party conversation.

[Read the entire interview]