Norman Morgan emailed this video which I had seen floating around the blogs recently, and it seemed fitting to share it and some followup as a vision of how the new interactivity of the web is changing our culture.
It was created by a Kansas State professor of Digital Ethnography(interesting title), Michael Wesch.
What has happened with this video is an example of the new web in and of itself. On his website, Wesch writes:
On January 31st I released the 2nd draft of The Machine is Us/ing Us hoping to receive feedback from my colleagues…. I sent it to 10 people. Four days later it was the most blogged about video in the blogosphere and the wild ride had begun. . . . It is hard to believe that a little video I created in my basement in St. George Kansas could be seen by over 1.7 million people, be translated into (at least) 5 languages, and be shown to large audiences at major conferences on 6 continents within just one month of its creation.
Also, as part of the “new” open source concept of an interactive web, he has licensed it under Creative Commons, which means that people are free to add to it, change the music, etc.
As part of the class, students are responding to the video with their own videos. I found this particular student video an undeniably powerful one that asks us some very hard questions about equity and web 2.0.
But I do believe in line with Daniel Pink in Whole New Mind that the new skills that will be important in this web 2.0 world will have to do with design and empathy–and the effectiveness of this video to move us and inspire thought (and perhaps action) is a tremendous example of the power of web 2.0.
What are your thoughts?
A slightly longer version of this post is cross posted at our vision committee blog: http://vision.edublogs.org/2007/03/23/we-are-web-20/
3 responses so far ↓
Carolyn,
Thanks for sharing the second video. I had not seen it and I think it is such an important part of the issue of how our world is changing!!
Janice
very thought provoking…thanks.
Although I thought the cat was good also.
[...] I think even with our knowledge of the difficulties in Afghanistan, the severity of the response was still somewhat surprising to both of us. I’ve been thinking about that email a lot in light of the YouTube video by a college student that I posted about a few days ago. [...]
Leave a Comment