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Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us
February 9, 2007 | 9:26 am
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By Branko Collin
A somewhat flattering introduction to Web 2.0, and how hypertext has made the written word a liquid thing, by Michael Wesch.
There’s also a version that can be annotated.
(Via David Weinberger.)
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Comments:
Subscribers to the ebook-community mailing list will already have seen my thoughts on this, at
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ebook-community/message/27496
I have to wonder whether the author is perpetrating a sly parody of Web 2.0 fan-boy enthusiasm. After all, his art piece is presented on the Web in a form that’s inextricably mixed with its content, with content that can’t be text-indexed by Google (it’s pictures of text, not text strings), and can’t even be OCR’ed and thus translated into other languages by engines like Babelfish. I have to think he’s actually poking fun at the concepts he’s ostensibly lauding.
At first I wanted to contrast Plato with Socrates, but then I could not figure out if the former was mocking the latter when he wrote the Phaedrus.
Wesch certainly has got his facts wrong about the order in which things happened, and It’s not like he’s saying anything new, but he’s pouring it in a form that should make the matter more accessible. Hey, it came David Weinberger-recommended, and as long as it’s not about politics that’s good enough for me.