My name is Miriam and I live in Montreal at the top floor of a very rickety walk-up with a cat and a dog. This summer I will be writing for Shameless on a variety of topics, but primarily on media, technology and young people. Being as this is Shameless Mag, and not some rando tech blog run by a bunch of l33t-speaking programmers who haven’t left their basements in nine years (although they can be fun folk too, in their way), I will pay particular attention to how gender and power figure into geek/media/youth culture.

Why geek/media/youth? Well, IMHO as our technology becomes more and more media-oriented the concepts of media and technology get harder to keep separate. I don’t know about you all, but I do a lot more with my computer then just compute. So as a writer and an activist, I like to think about how the stuff I watch, make or listen to, and the platforms (computer, television, cellphone) that I use, interact with each other and with the world that we live in.

Technically, I am not a youth (although I won’t be buying any anti-aging bajizness just yet). But I have spent the last while creating a program where groups of young people get together to make media projects, such as videos, photo galleries or hip-hop albums, and working with those groups was some of the most fun I’ve had in life. Which is where my MA and Shameless fit into the picture.

So there you have me, in a 268 word nutshell.

When not geeking out or trying to figure out iMovie codecs, I like to write about animals, cooking, sports for the athletically challenged and books.