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Digital Culture

Here’s a depressing Media story

So…a couple of really brilliant guys who do a little online comic called Penny Arcade decided before Christmas that they were going to show the world that gamers weren’t a bunch of backwards introspective adolescents hiding in their parents basements, but instead were giving, fully-grown members of society who wanted to spread the joy of games.

To this end, they started Child’s Play, a site through which donations could be made for children in the Seattle Children’s Hospital.

Here’s where the Media royally screwed up. After they showed up with more toys than you could believe (actual figures in a minute) and local Seattle media picked up the story, somehow it was reported that the donations were from a “local catholic school” and that the toys were valued at “nearly a thousand dollars.”

Here’s the scoop…this couple of cartoonists and gamers raised over $200,000 worth of toys. Two. Hundred. Thousand. Dollars. They had $16,000 worth of Game Boy Advance SP’s by themselves, not counting the rest of the toys.

Really impressive, and they aren’t making nearly as big a deal out of it as they should.

By griffey

Jason Griffey is the Director of Strategic Initiatives at NISO, where he works to identify new areas of the information ecosystem where standards expertise is useful and needed. Prior to joining NISO in 2019, Jason ran his own technology consulting company for libraries, has been both an Affiliate at metaLAB and a Fellow and Affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, and was an academic librarian in roles ranging from reference and instruction to Head of IT at the University of TN at Chattanooga.

Jason has written extensively on technology and libraries, including multiple books and a series of full-periodical issues on technology topics, most recently AI & Machine Learning in Libraries and Library Spaces and Smart Buildings: Technology, Metrics, and Iterative Design from 2018. His newest book, co-authored with Jeffery Pomerantz, will be published by MIT Press in 2024.

He has spoken internationally on topics such as artificial intelligence & machine learning, the future of technology and libraries, decentralization and the Blockchain, privacy, copyright, and intellectual property. A full list of his publications and presentations can be found on his CV.
He is one of eight winners of the Knight Foundation News Challenge for Libraries for the Measure the Future project (http://measurethefuture.net), an open hardware project designed to provide actionable use metrics for library spaces. He is also the creator and director of The LibraryBox Project (http://librarybox.us), an open source portable digital file distribution system.

Jason can be stalked obsessively online, and spends his free time with his daughter Eliza, reading, obsessing over gadgets, and preparing for the inevitable zombie uprising.

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