Publish or perish indeed. Now that the publishing part is free and without friction, and now that a professor can boil down complex topics to vivid videos, why aren’t tens of thousands of professors scrambling to do this?

Courtesy of Michael Wesch, professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State University comes this quick, quirky and succinct video on Web 2.0. “I know all about Web 2.0, why should I watch this?” you may ask. In short, it’s quite a masterpiece of presentation, and that’s why you should learn from its coolness, biatch.


Personally I think the message toward the end is overly optimistic. Web 2.0 will change the world? In some ways it already has. I can’t imagine the days when local mass media were the only news sources around. And life without every last statement meticulously dissected, argued and fisked? Or without celebrities like XX? Or comment spam? (How quaint all this seems already!)

But the bit about rethinking a few things… well… is Web 2.0 really going to change rhetoric and the world’s sense of aesthetics? I think Welsh is conflating Web 2.0 technologies with the concomitant globalization of societies that set the framework for participation in Web 2.0. Let’s not fall into the “IT = the world” trap, shall we?

(As an aside, this is why the Web 3.0 thing that Singapore is trying to promote is complete and utter BS. Web 2.0 isn’t about bigger and better websites. It’s not a new commodity, it’s a new philosophy. So tell me, what exactly are you thinking of when you aspire to upgrade beyond an entirely new way of doing things?)

As seen on Youtube « Seth Godin « Jim Gibbon.