I saw a couple of interesting videos on YouTube in the past day. The first–”Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us”–was produced by Prof. Michael Wesch and the Digital Ethnography working group he leads at Kansas State. This video tells the history of how we got to Web 2.0, and what it means for the way we communicate and think.
The second–”Epic 2014″–was produced by Robin Sloan and Matt Thompson while they were fellows at the Poynter Institute in 2004, and is described as a “future history of the media.” This piece gives a brief history of the corporatization of the web, and projects forward to a time when new media has brushed traditional media, such as the New York Times, into the dustbin of history.
These videos have a lot in common, most of all that they place us in the middle of a revolution that has changed the rules of communication. The first video revels in the promise of this evolution towards connectedness, while the second provacatively envisions a Philip K. Dickian (or Dickensian) future where every human is his/her own editor and where machines write news stories; it argues we may be overconnected in the future. Still, a central truth runs through these pieces; that is, Web 2.0 challenges and threatens to upend traditional notions of authority.
Has what it means to “read critically” changed, or is it just the texts that have changed? We’ve devoted much energy here to discussing how these new rules have affected the academy. If the future as envisioned in the second video is plausible, should colleges be responsible for explicitly integrating some form of media studies into their core curricula?
I think that we need fundamental changes in primary education (and I’m hardly the only one!). New generations of students approach this world organically, and not often in a critical or discerning matter. By the time they get to college, their stance towards media is already developed. How should society educate them into this environment? And what implications for nation, community, and citizenship does this new connectedness have? A crucial starting point, I believe, is to find ways to level the digital divide in K-12 education. Any new education policy that emphasizes equality of opportunity must begin with that. I’m not particularly hopeful on that front, for historical reasons.
These videos taken together remind us that technological progress, especially as it relates to connectedness, is distinct from social progress. We should welcome Web 2.0, but we should also realize and respond to the implications of its ascendency. We should use the tools to teach, but we should also teach about what it means to use the tools.
I haven’t had a chance to check out these links yet, but I wanted to say that I think your point about teaching something like media criticism much earlier on is a good one Luke. As a Writing Fellow I worked with a Critical Thinking course, in which one assignment required the students to prioritize a list of news stories. Some students’ ability to think methodically or analytically about television as a medium was pretty limited! I definitely don’t prescribe to the ‘audience as passive receptors’ perspective, but with the increased intensity of new media, and now combined media, I think it makes a lot of sense to start younger.
Reply to Deborah Gambs
Hi, this brings up some interesting issues. These two videos you posted seem to have attracted quite a following on the Internet. I’ve seen them on various blogs and have had people forward them to me as well. Yet, they are so disappointing and do little more than regurgitate the myths of the “revolution” in communications supposedly brought on by “new media”. All this hype in a world where the majority of people live on $2 a day and are certainly not internet savvy. Among those who are “plugged in”, sites like You Tube–where one can see how to dress a dog in a wedding outfit or watch teenagers practice karaoke–are hailed as groundbreaking media innovations. With this proliferation of the gospel of the democratization of news media, the decline in newspaper readership, and the ascendancy of online pundits, there is an expectation that we will be exposed to more voices, more insight, more choices. But I suspect this is not true. Someone who used to subscribe to a magazine devoted to how the earth was created 10,000 years ago will simply look up those websites that talk about how dinosaurs are a myth created by a liberal conspiracy. I strongly agree that technological progress is not the same as social progress. I am not sure how to bridge the two, but I think this is one of the most important issues that we face.
Reply to Agnieszka
I don’t agree that the revolution is a “myth.” I think it’s real, and both videos show how in concise ways: the first shows how the disaggregation of content from form has opened up access and ownership of information, and the second shows how the evolving logic of the web has changed the way we CAN relate to the world.
The question, to me, as you note, is how far-reaching is this revolution and what does it mean? Yes, YouTube has a lot of junk on it. It’s also got a lot of incredible stuff on it. It helped bring down a previously impervious senate campaign last fall, and there are clips submitted by soldiers and contractors in Iraq that graft terrifying and meaningful detail onto what we know about the situation there. These are truths worth seeing and acknowledging, and YouTube makes that possible. As with many media, though, crap mixes with gold in the virtual universe. That’s as true of newspapers, television, film, magazines, and books as it is of YouTube. The revolution lies in the difference: you and I and anyone else can post to YouTube, or comment on blogs, or edit wikis. That may mean that the crap:gold ratio skews in relation to other media– though not, I doubt, by much.
So, there’s more and more types of information available, and more people able to contribute their voices to the world. Though that’s revolutionary in and of itself, that’s not social progress. Same thing with the printing press.
How, then, do we harness technological progress in the service of social progress? Or, how do we even make sure that the social regression envisioned in EPIC 2014 doesn’t happen? I believe that this is a question not for the producers of media, but for the consumers of media (and their teachers) to answer. The error, in my opinion, of some of the rhetoric around Web 2.0 is that it foolheartedly assumes the medium is progressive in and of itself. It’s not. It’s a medium, and what’s important is how it’s used. I think our educational system must pro-actively make sure that students can sift through the information it allows them to access and generate knowledge. We shouldn’t confuse the ability to put up a MySpace page and click circles around 50-somethings with the ability to use Web 2.0–to read–critically.
Reply to Luke
I have had a chance to watch the videos, and also read a little about Web 2.0 now. On Wikipedia, of course. So anyone else who wants to know more about what Web 2.0 is can check it out there :-). I do think it’s pretty revolutionary–in a large-scale molecular network shifting the relations of informaiton sort of way. The notion of a platform, on which different pieces of information can be gathered and rearranged seems pretty interesting. I had to deal with this concretely this week because my personal blog’s host switched to using widgets. You can create or pull packets of information from all over to sit on the platform of your blog. And Google now allows you to personalize an online desktop of widgets. (I’ve got a calendar, my horoscope, ‘art of the day,’ my gmail, a clock, a mini-calculator.) And, we can word process online as well. Maybe we’re about to no longer need Microsoft. That would be pretty revolutionary. We do seem to be in process to a next level of the internet revolution. And even if most of the people in the world live on $2 a day, that doesn’t mean this revolution is passing them by completely. If they don’t have the internet, they’ve got a cell phone. I don’t actually know what capacity the cell phones used by people in developing nations is, beyond using it to create small businesses, but the gap between a cell phone and a computer here has rapidly shrunk. I agree that watching a dog do karaoke on YouTube probably does not have worldwide ramifications, and I think that people romanticize or exaggerate the democratic potential of the web, but it seems hard to deny the rapidly increasing number of users and contributors(which is the important part). And I do think the shift in medium is interesting; I may not believe that the medium is the message, but the technologies certainly do shape the message and how we can participate.
Reply to Deborah Gambs
Luke, I believe you misunderstood me. What I was referring to was not that the technological changes described in these videos but the hype, the ad copy, promoting, exaggerating and distorting the uses and potential of these technologies.
It’s very romantic and fashionable to compare Web 2.0 to the printing press. The odds of Web 2.0 having even remotely the kind of universal impact that say, “Common Sense” or vernacular translations of the Bible had, are slim to say the least.
What is interesting about these technologies is what happens when people are left to their own devices with them, as opposed to what these technologies could theoretically or idealistically be used for. People actually tend to use these technologies to create insular communities and in fact construct custom versions of reality that reinforce their own beliefs and prejudices. Web 2.0 is not an open, egalitarian, borderless, one-world ideal, but a collection of balkanized, gated communities. Revolutions refer to changes which affect whole societies and ALL classes of society, like the industrial revolution or the spread of democratization. As I said earlier, the internet is revolutionizing communications among the elite of the world, and a very small segment of world population.
Reply to Agnieszka
I think you’re right that a lot of the rhetoric around the evolution of the Web is based on things that could potentially happen, and not necessarily things that have happened already. That hype and projection, imo, is a byproduct of our culture (like balkanization and gated communities), which is separable from technological advance. But you don’t have to look too hard to see how people use these technologies in ways to be more connected and to learn and to challenge themselves. I’m as big a cynic and misanthrope as the next graduate student, but I don’t only see the usages you do.
Further, I don’t think it’s romantic at all to compare the Web to the invention of the printing press (Web 2.0 is analogous to the mass production of printing presses); and, at this point, I’m not sure the case has to be made real hard. The most significant impact of the printing press was not that it allowed wider dissemination of the bible, and certainly not that it allowed men–elites, all–to read “Common Sense” in the late 18th century, but in what it did for literacy, which in turn helped create the conditions for the transformations that led to political and social revolutions. The web hasn’t created political or social revolutions. It has, however, been behind the transformation of politics and the way many of us relate to each other. It’s radically transformed journalism and education, and has touched all classes of American society. It’s transformed the global economy, and created whole cities in parts of the world. It’s changed the very definition of literacy, in this country and many others, and it’s only in its infancy. It’s not hard to imagine that the next political or social movement that leads to real upheaval will happen through the Web, and be in-part shaped by the medium. At this point, how can it not? I don’t think that any of what I’ve written above is romantic or fashionable; it’s a description of reality.
The digital divide is a legitimate concern. As Deborah notes, though, it’s not permanent or insurmountable. Living on $2 a day can’t keep people from watching the World Cup, or from having access to a cell phone. Can it really be long before access to the web is universal? That access is already more wide-spread than the benefits of democratization, which itself took a while to benefit anyone but “elites.” Give it a generation.
I welcome and appreciate the skepticism– it’s needed. We must look at these tools critically, and not assume their very newness translates to progress. Personally, I think the first video I linked is a bit starry-eyed, and the second a bit gloomy… the truth likely lays somewhere in-between. The Web (1.0, 2.0 and all future versions) ultimately is only a medium, and the most important thing is how it’s used and evolved.
Reply to Luke