Michael Wesch graduated from the Kansas State’s undergraduate anthropology program 10 years ago, received his doctorate from the University of Virginia and returned to Kansas State as a faculty member in 2004. He said he created his first Web page in 1998 and has been looking at ways of presenting ethnographies in a more visual way. (Much of his research has focused on cultural practices in Papua New Guinea.)
As part of an article on Web 2.0 that is intended to appear in a journal of anthropology, Wesch created the video to appear on the publication’s Web site.
“I was trying to explain this stuff in the traditional paper format, and I thought, ‘This is ironic,’” he said. “I can illustrate this much better in a video.”
The difference between HTML and XML, the formation of blogs and the nonlinear quality of digital text are topics addressed in Wesch’s piece. The title, “The Machine is Us/ing Us,” is a reference to a point made in the video — that we are teaching our computer new ideas every time we click on a link. As Wesch says: “The more we are aware of the machine, the better we can make it serve us.”
And as he writes in the video, “Digital text is no longer just linking information. The Web is no longer just linking information. The Web is linking people.”
YouTube video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE
