Thanks to Peter Merholz for posting the message about Michael Wesch’s videos.


(Source: Information R/evolution)

This is a brilliant little production and I thoroughly enjoyed watching all 5:28 minutes of it. And the music was terrific!

It kinda reminded me of my work at the Consumer Information and Documentation centre. We had to deal with lots of data and information from books, journals, news serivces, reports, product testing: organising them; categorising them, cataloguing them, filing them, shelving, archiving them, etc. Our shelves and filing cabinets grew and grew with time but sometimes you still can’t find the one piece of important research results or statistic that you really, really need.

How times have changed. The physical constraints that bounded information as we know it then and now is being changed and challenged by the ‘infinite’ cyberspace.

“There is no shelf!” :D

The dawn of the digital r/evolution has seen the ‘mob’ (borrowing the term from Mark Pesce) using; creating; reusing, building upon; manipulating information on the web. And it’s growing by the second, and with each word that I add to this blog. The mob is overtaking the experts: on wiki, blogs, websites, social networking sites. They have found their voices and they want to be heard, and perhaps be connected and recognised.

There is a down side. Those of us who trawl through our emails (and spam) on a daily basis - one just can’t seem to keep up with them. I wonder if we can ever keep up with this information overload. Or even how can we manage our emails better?

What about the websites we visit? the blogs we read or create? the increasing long lists of usergroups and mailing lists we subscribe to? do we even have time to do all that and consume every bit of information? And that’s not counting the social networking sites we participate in: the myspace, youtube, flickr, facebook slideshare,…

Humankind is at the cusp of this digital age r/evolution. Will this new digital r/evolution which is enamouring us also cripple us? Or will we cripple it? Or will it be even “bigger” than the total sum of humankind?

Wesch established the Digital Ethnography working group at Kansas State University. Their mission: “exploring the impacts of digital technology on human interaction and human interaction on digital technology.”

That is interesting research that Wesch and his students are involved in: they are observing the actors and are themselves actors in the digital cyberspace movie. Watch that space and you are invited to join the discussion!

Other videos from Wesch’s group: