I'd like to comment on the Michael Wesch video that you have posted "The Machine is Us(ing) Us"
Tracing the evolution of the written word to digital text to hypertext to Web 2.0 mash-ups, this video presents a rhetorical question as to what could come next. Each evolution provided a quantum leap in connectivity - beginning with from one to many and ending with from many to many.
As our understanding of human neuroscience evolves, the comparison of the brain and the net are tempting. There are many who subscribe that the Internet could become sentient because of the similarities to it and the brain. The fact that the Internet is pulsing with activity, as the video quotes, 100 billion times per day, the theory submits that it's sentience could reflect our collective intelligence in some (euphemistic) way.
Jaron Lanier suggests in his book You Are Not A Gadget that the digitization of social interaction in FaceBook and other social networks is evolving in a dangerous direction: that, far from a benevolent hive mind, the so-called 2.0 tools are actually information-for-profit collectors that are used against us. Like mice drawn to cheese, we are eventually trapped by the definitions of human interaction as designed into common Web 2.0 tools through repetition and dependence. And where users are thinking that all of the free new social tools are made for them, they miss the fact that a great deal of information about them is being systematically gleaned and stored for sale. In other words, FaceBook and MySpace, etc. are not products we use to keep in touch with our friends; instead we are the product that they sell. This is what the video is hinting at. The machine is using us. But, since we created the machine (in our image, so to speak), the machine is also us.
Orginal blog quote from Tom Kowalewksi:
I am going way out on a limb here and now by saying education is all about communication. Not just communication between teacher and student in face-to-face teaching situations but also communication over time and space virtually everywhere. With communication in mind, place yourself anywhere, in any time, look around, either virtually or really, you are learning as you gaze about. Education is a form of story telling because teachers tell students stories about their curriculum. Virtual story telling goes all the way back to cave drawings we are still finding today. Someone had a story to tell, information to communicate, and we are virtually figuring out the data. The image communicates. It is a language that expresses the author's feelings at the time for those who view it later. It is a virtual world the author left to us.
