Week 9: Thing #20 YouTube

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4CV05HyAbM Information R/evolution

Kansas State University assistant professor, Michael Wesch, has created several thought-provoking videos about Web 2.0. These videos are available on YouTube. Several of his titles are the The Machine is Us/ing Us, linked from Library 2.0 website, The Information R/evolution, and A Vision of Students Today.

I found Wesch’s video presentations powerful and love the availability that YouTube provides.

Using the image of a restless cursor on a digital page throughout much of The Machine is Us/ing Us, Wesch asserts that the Web 2.0 revolution challenges us to rethink everything, including copyright, identity, authorship, privacy, commerce, love, family, and even ourselves.

In another video called Information R/evolution Wesch, who teaches Digital Ethnography, claims that the Web 2.0 revolution has changed the rules of order, of how we think about and organize information. Wesch refers to David Weinberger’s book, Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder (Chapter 1 is available on Weinberger’s blog), to illustrate the inefficiencies of ordering things in the physical realm and the tremendous flexibility and accessibility of “third order organization,” the use of tags in the digital realm.

In Information R/evolution Wesch also refers to Clay Shirky’s fascinating online essay, Ontology is Overrrated: Categories, Links, and Tags on Shirky's Writings about the Internet site. Here again Wesch, via Shirky, asserts that the alternate organization system – tags and the aggregating of tags – does a better job of allowing users to create value from one another than previous, hierarchical structures such as search directories permit. It’s a powerful message whose truth is demonstrated by the explosion of the Web as a means of communicating through 2.0 applications such as YouTube, blogs, and Flickr.

I loved being able to see these brilliant videos on YouTube and then follow up the references that interested me.

These videos have been used effectively in various ways in my school as professional development resources.