[Air-l] Web 2.0 - "the machine is us?"

[Heidelberg, Chris]

Jill:

The most obvious examples are Digging for the Truth with Josh Bernstein;
Engineering An Empire with Peter Weller and Modern Marvels on The
History Channel. However, the most purely academic show is an academic
class: Bravo's Actors Studio at the New School in New York City. I found
these examples when conducting my research and utilized the model for my
study. 

-----Original Message-----
From: air-l-bounces at listserv.aoir.org
[mailto:air-l-bounces at listserv.aoir.org] On Behalf Of Jill Walker
Sent: Tuesday, February 13, 2007 10:12 AM
To: air-l at listserv.aoir.org
Subject: Re: [Air-l] Web 2.0 - "the machine is us?"

I used this video to start my class on blogging last week - and yes, it
worked very well as a discussion-starter.

I think one of the most encouraging things about this video is that it's
made by an academic - Michael Wesch is an Associate Professor of
anthropology and is doing research on "digital anthropology". He said he
was writing a conference paper and felt that it would be so much more
obvious to use the medium to express the ideas - and certainly that was
a great way of getting some of these ideas out there. The video's been
the most linked-to video (according to technorati.com) for the past week
(over 5000 blogs link to it), it's the most viewed this month on
YouTube's science and technology category and has nearly a million
views.

That's pretty awesome for an academic presentation of any kind!

It's also an example of a presentation that performs that which it's
talking about - performative research, if you like. And while there are
clearly many things not dealt with in the video (it's only 4 and a half
minutes long) it grapples with some major issues - just the claims and
counterclaims about what paper permits as a medium does are wonderful.

Does anyone know of other examples of academics who've made things
online like this that actually do have some academic content and that
have become wildly popular?

Jill

----
Jill Walker
Associate Professor, Dept of Humanistic Informatics, University of
Bergen, Norway http://jilltxt.net



> Wesch does an excellent job in a brief presentation of providing a 
> tentative definition of 'Web 2.0' and hinting at its possible impacts.

> He does not attempt to provide a clear explanation of the ways in 
> which Web 2.0 is distinctly different from 'social software'
> that has been around on the Internet since the beginning (Usenet, 
> mailing lists, collaboratively authored FAQs etc) nor does he discuss 
> the implications of the fact that Web 2.0 users are still a minority 
> of users and active Web 2.0 contribution is largely the work of a 
> still smaller minority (something I recently posted about in more 
> detail on the Media at LSE weblog here):
>
> http://groupblog.workasone.net/archives/2007/02/overstating-the-
> significance-of-web-20/
>
> But of course a 5 minute video is not a paper so that would be too 
> much to expect - the video would make an excellent starting point for 
> discussion of these issues in a classroom.
>
> ---
> David Brake, Doctoral Student in Media and Communications, London 
> School of Economics & Political Science 
> <http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/media@lse/study/
> mPhilPhDMediaAndCommunications.htm>
> Also see http://davidbrake.org/ (home page), http://blog.org/ 
> (personal weblog) and http://get.to/lseblog (academic groupblog) 
> Author of Dealing With E-Mail - <http://davidbrake.org/ 
> dealingwithemail/> callto://DavidBrake (Skype.com's Instant Messenger 
> and net phone)
>
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