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.)

RELATED ARTICLESMORE FROM AUTHOR

2 COMMENTS

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

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