Activity 6 The way ideas are produced and spread using social networks

We then watched a presentation made by Wesch to the "library of congress" about web 2.0 and he talks about what happened with the "is the machine us/ing us" video we watched earlier.

He states that because of all the web 2.0 tools such as You Tube, Delicious, Digg it, etc, the viral spread of the word to watch his video was exponential.

He highlights the issues of
web 2.0 building community - people emulating each other and sharing experiences
People wanting to share something with others - not caring what they think - being oneself
A celebration of a new form of empowerment, a new form of community and types of community not seen before, global connections, transcending space and time.

About the Machine video he says
I started with text on paper and thinking about what it meant to move to digital text and what that move really means
what I was trying to get at was when you unpack the impacts of the – digital text and you think about the separation of form and content blogs, Wiki’s, tagging; all of these things leads to a necessity to really think what the web is all about.
it is actually about linking people and it's about linking people in ways that we've never been linked before

User control (link to McLuhan perhaps)
This is like user generated filtering where the users can get together and they can they can give it the thumbs up if they like it.
is user-generated organisation eg Delicious and Digg It
user-generated distribution eg RSS
user-generated commentary eg blogging

really interesting integrated mediascape that we now live in. And at the centre of this mediascape is us.

Basically he was saying that through the web 2.0 tools of organisation, distribution and commentary, people (us) are controlling the sharing of knowledge around the networked world.

What Wesch was intending to do when he made the video, was not to see what people learned from the video, but to see what social action took place after it was published on You Tube.

You can watch Wesch's presntation here on You Tube.