Michael Wesch, assistant professor in Sociology, Anthropology, and Social Work, continues to publish YouTube videos about the technology of media and how it’s changing lives. (His debut video “Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us” that went live in January 2007 became a worldwide hit and currently has 6,224,476 views.)
“I don’t think of (media) as content, and I don’t even think of it as tools of communication,” Wesch said in his June 23 presentation about YouTube at the Library of Congress (see “An anthropological introduction to YouTube” below).
“I think of media as mediating human relationships,” he said. “And that’s important, because when media changed, then human relationships changed. …And that’s why I wanted to suggest that we’re gonna have to rethink all of these things, including ourselves.”
See Wesch’s space on YouTube for these and more:
An anthropological introduction to YouTube is Wesch’s June 23 presentation at the Library of Congress. It includes more than 40 minutes of entertaining and insightful YouTube videos compiled by Wesch and his students to exemplify what YouTube is and how it is changing our world and views. (To jump to specific portions of the presentation, use the “More info” link in the right column to see an index of section topics and their timepoints.)
(added to YouTube July 26, 2008. Current viewings: 186,603)
A Portal to Media Literacy includes a PowerPoint presentation with Wesch’s signature mix of interesting facts and viewpoints. It targets the assumptions that govern standard education and knowledge acquisition — and how those assumptions have been negated by the ways that students and the public are using technology to acquire, create, and use information.
(added to YouTube July 10, 2008. Current viewings: 13,254)
A Vision of Students Today is a 5-minute video created by Wesch in collaboration with 200 students at K-State. According to Wesch’s overview, it covers “some of the most important characteristics of students today — how they learn, what they need to learn, their goals, hopes, dreams, what their lives will be like, and what kinds of changes they will experience in their lifetime.” His students researched, compiled data, and are silent signholders in the video, which document facts and numbers from the viewpoint of today’s college students.
(added to YouTube Oct. 12, 2007. Current viewings: 2,579,128)
