Educational tool becomes top internet video
February 12th, 2007 by Zsofia
Just one week after it appeared on YouTube, a 5 min. short film on the history of the web has become one of the world’s top internet videos. Michael Wesch, who teaches cultural anthropology at Kansas State University, created the compelling film “The Machine is Us/ing Us” to chronicle the evolution of the internet as a visual aid to use in class.
The video (available here) traces the development of human communication from handwriting, through digital text and HTML to technology that currently allows anyone to publish and share whatever they want without knowing the code. Wesch celebrates human achievement but also reminds us that we need to rethink issues such as “authorship, identity, ethics, aesthetics, rhetorics, governance, privacy, commerce, love, family, and ourselves.”
For more info, read an interview with Wesch on The Daily Reel, and check out the creator’s Digital Ethnography blog.
