Watching any of the videos by Michael Wesch is exciting. I love them! They are very interesting to me because of the classes I’m currently taking, and because I work in an IT department at a school. By being in an education environment, I can see the way students prefer to learn and how instructors teach have changed over the years. In conversations I hear across campus, no longer are students talking about certain textbook or encyclopedias. Google, YouTube, and Wikipedia is now their sources of information.
In An anthropological introduction of YouTube ,Wesch’s says that “when media change, human relationships change”. I see that students no longer sit in the cafeteria reading a book, or just hanging out with friends, most are online with a laptop, netbook, or iPhone. All seeming to be disengaged from their current surroundings. I do realize they are not alone, but are in their virtual world, with their friends, whether it’s someone across the room or around the world. And, maybe it’s the person sitting right beside them. Who knows?
I could really relate to his term “contact collapse”. In doing my weekly videos, I just want to be invisible. I hope that my friends and family never find my videos. I know I don’t have to worry, but I’ve wondered what I would do if one of my went “viral”. I would be so embarrassed.
One of the main things that stood out in this video for me was the comment about Carl Sagan calling our planet Earth “The Pale Blue Dot…the only home we’ve ever known”. And I loved Wesch’s follow up poem, …that dot, that’s there, that’s somewhere else, that’s everybody, on the other side of that dot, is everyone you know, everyone you love, everyone you’ve ever heard of….billions of potential viewers…it’s a little glass dot, the eyes of the world” Wow! No wonder it’s so hard to make those weekly videos.
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