I personally did not like this reading much. It felt it was very abstract and the speaker Paul Miller goes back and forth about improvising and the digital community, giving us so many different examples and ways to think about it that the discussion loses its main focus. Miller talks about magic, film, memory, recordings, economics, and commerce but does not give a clear understanding of putting it into the improvisation context. There is too much to keep track of and follow in the article which I believe actually digresses from the main point and makes the reader more confused and the dialogue hard to follow. The moderator and Iyer keep trying to bring Paul back to tie this to the idea of the digital community.

Having said that, there are a few lines I particularly found interesting. After reading the article twice, the definition of improvisation that I understood was, “Improvisation is navigating an informational landscape.” This is why learning how to just be in this world is also classified as a primal level of improvisation – quite an interesting idea actually! Putting it into the digital context, Miller says, “For me as an artist, digital media is about never saying that there’s something that’s finished. Once something’s digital, anything can be edited, transformed, and completely made into a new thing.” I never thought about digital media that way. In this case, there is so much scope for improvising in a digital culture. Everything online is a record and everyone listens to records, which are just documents or files essentially. But improvising with this cascade of information is what converts raw data into useful information – making it a form of improvisation in the digital community.