An anthropological introduction to YouTube
Submitted by Erik on Tue, 08/05/2008 - 10:21pm.
I just discovered this fascinating 4:30 video, Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us by Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University. Similar to the Shift Happens video that many of us have watched as part of NPS Strategic Planning, this one is important because of the enormous cultural/social (anthropological?) trends that it points out and the implications for how we learn and relate to one another - both in and out of the classroom.
If you have time and want more context on how the research for this video was conducted and how the video itself was made, I also recommend that you watch this 55 minute video of Professor Mesch's presentation to the Library of Congress, entitled An anthropological introduction to YouTube. This is amazing stuff!
In particular, there is a very striking set of insights starting around 45:15.
We're living in a den of thieves, where things we do are often illegal in some way
We can't kill the instinct that technology creates in kids.
We can only criminalize it.
We can't stop our kids' from pursuing those instincts
We can only drive them underground
We can't make our kids passive consumers again
We can only make them pirates
Is that good?
Kids are groing up knowing that they live life against (some of) the law(s).
This is Corrosive.
It's Corrupting.
In a democracy, we ought to do better
interesting, but ..
The video is very cute.
But as a former member of the W3C XML Working Group (back in the formative stages of XML), I have to chuckle at the notion that XML made all of this possible. It's kind of like saying that ASCII made it possible for computers to process text. Yes, XML enabled us to mark up data for what it was, rather than how it should be presented. But it's not like it was impossible to do that before XML, or indeed to even do it now without XML. In fact, I'd daresay that Drupal? and other systems accomplish more by organizing this stuff in a database than representing it in XML.
But whatever.. it makes a good sales pitch.