You've probably already seen that spiffy little video about hypertext, XML, and Web 2.0 and how it's changing the world. It's by cultural anthropologist Michael Wesch and is called "Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us," though the title doesn't appear in the video. By "using us" he means that the machine (i.e. the web) "learns" when we tell it stuff -- probably the hokiest and least true point he makes in the video.
It's a clever little piece and it makes a few good bullet points about the changing nature of how we experience text, but I'm amazed at the overblown reaction to this thing. There isn't much substance to it -- basically a bit of information science 101 combined with some trite Web 2.0/user-generated media hype. But it's got style, which counts for a lot with today's techno/web enthusiasts (Lawrence Lessig's books may be a bore, but boy has he got the hippest posters for his talks of any academic!).
It's not surprising, I guess, that a video cheering on user-generated content is embraced by those same users. Yay us! (or yay you!)
This article at Inside Higher Ed tells the story of the video and its reception: A lesson in viral video. I originally spotted the video at Chris Anderson's blog: The Long Tail: This is what I'm talking about, though it's been everywhere else too (BoingBoing, Lessig, even the Transhumanists love it!).
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