Michael Wesch and the Potential of Web 2.0

Michael Wesch's talk at the CHAT Festival opened my eyes to how little I know about the internet. To be honest, I have no real desire to be a computer engineer, so it is likely that I will ever be required to have any sort of deep or technical understanding of how computers or the internet actually work. As a result, I have always dismissed any talk about the internet as irrelevant and entirely out of my sphere of knowledge. Michael Wesch's talk at the CHAT Festival, combined with our discussions in my This is Your Brain on the Internet class, have convinced me otherwise. Even though much of the content in Weschs video The Machine is Us/ing Us went way over my head in terms of its use of technical terms about digital technology (the fact that a mess of numbers, letters, and symbols somehow translate into the elaborate website designs we see today is mystifying to me), the overall message stands out to me as something essential to life in the 21st century.

Wesch, a professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University, argues that the internet has altered not only the availability of information, but also the information itself. The success of his video The Machine is Us/ing Us is a perfect example of his point. Made in a small house in rural Kansas, The Machine is Us/ing Us rapidly spread across the web, getting millions of view on sites like Youtube and Digg, as well as inspiring bloggers to respond with their own ideas. The fact that an inexpensive video served as the catalyst for a worldwide conversation speaks volumes about the restructuring of power in the modern world. This open network of information that is almost universally accessible replaces the top-down network of the past. Rather than relying on elites to distribute knowledge at their discretion, now anyone can log onto the internet and search for the subject of their choice or, even more radical, publish new information. In this way, the traditional definition of expert as an intellectual elite is essentially eradicated, replaced by a more democratic system in which the work of ordinary people has the potential to become universally recognized (for example, the Soulja Boy song and dance first became famous on Youtube and MySpace before it was picked up by a recording label).

Because of the user-filtering component of Web 2.0, the subjects we (ordinary people who use the internet) are most interested in become the headlines. In this way, we have control over our information systems in a way that was previously not possible. The media may have a tendency to add a certain bias to the information it presents, but we now have the opportunity to respond. I couldnt agree more with Wesch when he says that this ongoing dialogue that can now takes place has the potential to cause shifts in countless different aspects of life. We simply need to learn how to best utilize the new technologies available to us, and our voices will be heard not simply by our friends and families, but also by the world as a whole.