Spotlight: Michael Wesch

The vast sea of the Internet holds enough treasures (or cats) to keep anyone occupied for hours, yet once in a while I’ll come across some piece of content — be it a blog, video, or even resume — that impresses me to such a degree that I have to spend the next hour finding out more. I want to highlight in this article Michael Wesch, a professor of anthropology at Kentucky State University, whose popularity exploded through one of his infamous YouTube videos on Web 2.0. If you’ve never seen it, then please watch:

[youtube=http://youtube.com/watch?v=NLlGopyXT_g&hl=en]
The Machine is Us/ing Us

I’m especially drawn to the method he employs (not the medium of YouTube, but the constant motion of editing) because it involves a lot of my recent thoughts on text (both as a form and as a medium) that have personally materialized in my Literary Criticism class at the end of the spring semester. I particularly like his explanation of XML and how the language initially emphasizes content over form, but then, in its implementation, the content becomes the form to produce the content.

In a second video, he discusses how the way we have organized information digitally — on computers and through the Internet — may need to be changed if we want to keep improving the technology and evolving through it.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4CV05HyAbM&hl=en]
Information R/evolution

One more video of note:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGCJ46vyR9o&hl=en]
A Vision of Students Today

This is especially important to watch if you’re a student at any university or college in the United States, or will soon enter one. Just as with digital information, Wesch argues that the system and techniques of the contemporary university need reorganization. The video pinpoints a good number of problems that students face everyday in the classroom and suggest how these problems suppress a positive evolution in higher education (ie. one of the last examples is simply the chalkboard). I also admire how the video identifies prominent aspects of the emerging generation (called digital natives, Generation Y, and the Millennials) and how they interact with the current collegiate structure.

Also, check out Michael Wesch’s blog on digital ethnography. I really wish I could study under him for a bit, since I feel it necessary to draw from cultural anthropology when examining the Internet, fan cultures, etc., but it’s Kentuuucky. And I like the East Coast.