Michael Wesch

Michael Wesch is a cultural anthropologist and media ecologist exploring the impacts of new media on human interaction. He graduated summa cum laude from the Kansas State University Anthropology Program in 1997 and returned as a faculty member in 2004 after receiving his PhD in Anthropology at the University of Virginia. There he pursued research on social and cultural change in Melanesia, focusing on the introduction of print and print-based practices like mapping and census-taking in the Mountain Ok region of Papua New Guinea where he lived for a total of 18 months from 1999-2003. This work inspired Wesch to examine the impacts of new media more broadly, especially digital media. (Source: Kansas State University website)

His video "The Machine Is Us/ing Us" became the most popular video on YouTube with more than 3.000.000 viewers. The video has to do with the changes that web 2.0 has brought, brings or is about to bring in our lives. You can find the video at the right side of the page, at YouTube M&C Videos or here:

You can read a very interesting interview of Michael Wesch, talking about the ideas that led him to the creation of this video, here: http://battellemedia.com/archives/003386.php
Furthermore, you can visit the webpage of Michael Wesch's digital ethnography working group, a team of cultural anthropology undergraduates, exploring the impacts of digital technology on human interaction and vice versa: http://mediatedcultures.net/
Recently, a new video was uploaded by Dr. Michael Wesch entitled "A Vision Of Students Today" that has to do with being a student in a digital era and society.

Since the famous video of Michael Wesch is about web 2.0, it would be good if we take a look at it:

WEB 2.0

What is web 2.0? There is not a definite answer but there are a lot of possible answers and definitions. Mr. Stewart writes:

"Building on this rather complicated meme map, Michael Platt offers the following five qualities as being defining characteristics of web 2.0

• Network and devices as a platform
• Data consumption and remixing from all sources including user generated data
• Continuous update
• Rich and interactive UI
• Architecture of participation
(after Platt 2006)"

"Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the weorld wide web, is quoted in an interview with developerWorks in August 2006 as saying:-

“Web 1.0 was all about connecting people. It was an interactive space, and I think Web 2.0 is, of course, a piece of jargon, nobody even knows what it means. If Web 2.0 for you is blogs and wikis, then that is people to people. But that was what the Web was supposed to be all along."

"So what are typical web 2.0 sites:-

Delicious - http://del.icio.us
Flickr - http://www.flickr.com/
Blogger - http://www.blogger.com
YouTube - http://youtube.com/

Many commentators also include social networking sites like:
MySpace - http://www.myspace.com/
Facebook - http://www.facebook.com"

"Two other terms that have also gain wide currency amongst commentators in the last two years are APIs and mash-ups. According to ‘librarything’, Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) are “ways for one computer to talk to another, simple ways of getting and giving data without having to share programming code”. APIs are not a new thing in computer programming...This ‘openness’ means that developers outside of the corporate group can develop applications based on the web service. At first, this might appear to be a risky strategy as the third party developers can develop applications that compete with the company’s offerings...Open APIs also allow developers to combine data sets into new applications called a ‘mash-ups’. For example, it is possible to combine mapping data with photographic data drawn form two different databases. "

Are Bloggers ‘Citizen Journalists’? : Journalism and Web 2.0

"A recent article by Donnacha DeLong published in the National Union of Journalists has rekindled a long running debate about the relationship between bloggers and traditional news journalists. In this piece DeLong argues that problem with web2.0 and bloggers is that they are seen by some commentators as “replacing traditional media” . DeLong argues that this is a bad thing because “professional media provide users with something that we need to fight to retain – truly authoritative content”. However, those who “those who argue that Web 2.0 is the future want to throw out the baby with the bathwater.”

Should blogging be treated as a threat to traditional journalism? Nope. I don't think so. I believe that blogging should be treated as a research tool. Journalists could gather a large amount of possibly important information by communicating with the "citizen journalists". Nevertheless, since journalism faces its own decay, it's absolutely understandable why every writing effort by amateurs is considered a menace. Blogging means more opinions, more sources and, therefore, easier and more complete research for the professional journalists.

Is anybody going to be happy to get his/her news from a blogger or from a government website? Nope. We can't deny the amateur element of blogging. We, also, can't deny the non-subjective coverage of the news from a government source. Of course neither journalists are subjective and they, almost, always follow guidelines but if we have to live in a lie let's choose the most convenient one, right? To conclude, I would trust only professional journalists.

Web 3.0? We still don't know the definition of Web 2.0 and a new term came up. To tell you the truth I don't care even if there is the term Web 156.0. I think that, nowadays there is the tendency of creating a term and, then defining it. Ok, this is good for writing big essays and "interesting" articles but, personally, I find it boring. I don't like to find blogs or webpages that try to be fortune-tellers, predicting what Web 5.0 will be. I don't care how you name it, I care about the content. Creating terms without content, in my eyes, is provoking and naive. But that's just me.