Week 5 Activity 4 - Video about Web 2.0

This activity was to watch a animation/video explaining what WEb 2.0 is. The idea being to compare in the next activity our responses to the written word from Activity 3 (O'Reilly's article on web 2) and the video communication later in Activity 6.

The video is on You Tube here. It's by Michael Wesch, who works at Kansas State University heading up a group which is dedicated to exploring and extending the possibilities of digital ethnography.

It's interesting to see in the forums that there is a variety of responses to the video. Interestingly I think I was the only one who preferred the video with the sound on. It was just background music, no narration, but for me it helped me to focus my senses on the video. When I turned the music off I found I couldn't concentrate as easily - 1. because I'd already watched it so maybe if I was watching it for the first time I'd have felt differently and 2. there was back ground noise around me so that distracted my audio senses.

The discussions just show how many different preferences there are out there.
We also talked about accessibility issues surrounding the video and came up with obvious ones just as problems for visually impaired and people without broadband internet.

Taking the quote from McLuhan that the "message is the medium" - what this video did was use the medium web 2.0 to explain what web 2.0 is. The video used images of the internet really cleverly to explain what we were being told so people could relate what they use on the internet with the definition of web2.0.

He concluded the video by saying that we are web 2.0, without individual input there would be no web 2.0.