Saw this @ SavageMinds before it turned up ‘pon BoingBoing, but I was glad it appeared @ the latter too b/c I think it should be seen widely: not only is it interesting and inspiring, it’s cool and well-executed (& I’m pretty sure the music was made on friggin FruityLoops!). It might be hyperbolic, it might be hype, but I’m into it. Props to Mike Wesch. More arguments like these please —
techno-optimism/technophilia in full effect! clever execution aside,
when has mainstream mapping (via rhizomatic web2.0 folksonomy or top-down colonial borders) not been used to support the status quo?
his rhetoric of sharing, collaboration, and ‘we teach the machine’ doesnt allay my concerns… the ability to own and analyze enormous amounts of web2.0 meta-data is only available to corporate giants like Google and Rupert Murdoch (Fox,Sky).
i hear you, jace. and you join a chorus of ppl calling for the video to be more critical. i’d personally like to see some response videos, remixes, etc. b/c i think there actually is a lot of potential for greater interaction and community and subversion in web 2oh-ish ish. whether that means it’ll ultimately change the status quo, hrm, i guess it depends on what you mean. if you mean capitalism and gross wealth inequality and fucked up ideologies justifying injustice, well, i can’t get my hopes up for that stuff going anywhere anytime soon, networked or not.
still, i wonder about the possibilities of (open-source) distributed forms of collaboration, especially as more of the ppl in the world get aboard (access, of course, quite determined by the status quo). some glimmers there, perhaps.
and i’m not sure it’s all reducible to ‘mainstream mapping,’ tho i agree a lot of it ends up being/doing just that.
but i’m not sure. (thx for the thoughts!)
at risk of kicking a dead horse, i see it as — the possibilities for distributed collaboration are largely predetermined by the underlying tech, which links into one of the most interesting parts of the video, his gloss on the difference between HTML and XML. but at present most forms of network-distributed collabo are pretty slim.
i think most of web2.0 activities is lil autonomous nodes — blogs, youtube uploaders & viewers, myspace clients — people engaged in similar activities in similar spaces but not necessarily collaborating in the general sense of the term, more like people dancing in the same room. much of this is fantastic, of course! here i am, commenting on your blog… yet where i get wary is that much of this latter engagement creates enormous amount of self-mapping (flickr/delicious, etc,) and meta-data, and only big corps like Google or Murdoch have access or ability to scan this, with the possib that their use of the data we generate from blogging & tagging & uploading & linking could be employed to further bend & shape internet-citizen desires, in a weird and contemporary mingling of rhizomatic info drawn up and re-used for top-down (& viral) marketing, advertising, channeling of consumer desire, etc.
i think im saying web2.0 culture is great, but the monetization/meta-data analysis of that culture could easily be applied to uses out of step with web2.0’s XML-y emphasis on collabo, trading, datamashup, sharing, etc.
ok, off to read yr new posts, thanks for the feedback