Comments on: mike wesch rocks the video essay

By: Oscar

Oscar — Fri, 16 Feb 2007 14:48:45 +0000

I respectfully dissent from some of the praise for Mike’s video. It is certainly well made; I am less certain of the truth that it communicates. Here’s a brief discussion at another site: http://hnn.us/blogs/entries/35417.html

By: ckelty

ckelty — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 18:24:56 +0000

Mike is officially a meme. I have now received 4 separate emails from various walks of my life telling me about this video :)

By: Narrative 2.0 at Localoaf

Narrative 2.0 at Localoaf — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 22:08:43 +0000

[...] Originally posted at Savage Minds Shared by DJ Ripley Tags: animation, narrative, video, web2.0, XML. [...]

By: The Participant Observer » Blog Archive » Web 2.0…it’s all about the metadata

Tue, 13 Feb 2007 18:10:07 +0000

[...] Though I joined the lovefest over this video at Savage Minds; shared it with dozens of people last week; and am genuinely grateful it was produced and posted; I have some problems with the representation of Web 2.0 it makes. [...]

By: Ofer

Ofer — Fri, 09 Feb 2007 22:41:08 +0000

this movie is art and it is the reality today

the best part is the connecting people from all over the world

I wish it was possible to translate this movie to all langugues!

warm greetings from Israel

Ofer Weisglass

By: Lynn Schofield Clark

Lynn Schofield Clark — Fri, 09 Feb 2007 14:03:09 +0000

I ran across this while writing on multimedia developments and uses within qualitative research. My own research is on social networking uses, and this gives me some great ideas on how to present that research. Thanks for a thought-provoking essay!

By: plonewars.com - » Asymmetric Competition and the CMS

plonewars.com - » Asymmetric Competition and the CMS — Fri, 09 Feb 2007 07:00:54 +0000

[...] (thanks to Biella for the video reference and the critical commentary). [...]

By: Kevin Braddock

Kevin Braddock — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 09:16:42 +0000

Hi Mike. I realy enjoyed your video essay – It raises some extremely interesting questions.

All the best

By: Anthropology.net

Anthropology.net — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 01:46:40 +0000

Mike Wesch’s Web 2.0 video makes waves, expands our understanding of this digital phenomenon…

This video first appeared on Savage Minds several days ago, but since it is such an intuitive and intelligent visualization and explanation of “Web 2.0″ and how anthropology can benefit from it, that Gizmodo, a high level tech blog linked up to it. T…

By: Doyle Saylor

Doyle Saylor — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 23:15:10 +0000

Another perspective on the non-linear ‘language’ issue is “Culture and the Senses, Bodily Ways of Knowing in an African Community” UC Press, Geurts, Kathryn Linn, 2002.

This is a study conducted in Ghana about the Ano-land, and their language Anlo-Ewe People in the sense of a language can convey no boundary between body and world. So their language elaborates the senses and the body in a continuum not present in Western culture.
Doyle

By: Doyle Saylor

Doyle Saylor — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 20:08:35 +0000

Here is a video by an autistic person exploring the same general principles but more visually and more directly adapted to the world itself than is text: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnylM1hI2jc

Doyle

By: Mike

Mike — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 18:03:35 +0000

Wouldn’t that be great? Imagine a whole video conversation, critically informed, with all of the insights we all think anthropology has to offer, playing out in front of thousands of people. I’ll certainly do my best to keep the conversation going.

By: w&w

w&w — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 17:56:57 +0000

Excellent work, Mike! And great to see so much conversation happening in so many places. As for the critical discussion within anthro/design — I’d love to see some response videos!

By: Jenny Cool

Jenny Cool — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 17:51:47 +0000

Mike’s Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us video is so provocative, it’s hard to know where to begin. With form? Content? Commentary? Whatever one’s response to the argument presented, it is, as ckelty introduced it here, a masterful example of a video essay. Thanks for making and posting it. I see it as a great discussion starter and teaching video that I plan to share with all and sundry. May it inspire more work in this vein from all corners.

As an essay, it’s certainly text-centric; as a video it presents a closed narrative where an authoritative reading of the work is narrated through images of the words themselves. I see here the traditional “voice of god” cleverly updated to “desktop of god,” or rather, “desktop of user playing god,” a role one pretty much has to take on as author of an essay, no? I don’t see it as a shortcoming, nor how this is any more linear than any other video.

For those who use the sites and media pictured, the images are not just textual, they depict familiar interfaces and seens [sic]–the multilingual salutations that welcome you to Flickr, Wikipedia’s jigsaw globe, the austere utility of Notepad, the colorful utility of Google, and the YouTube logo, so sweetly poached for the filmmaker’s own “Digital ethnography” mark. As so many, I spend much of my life moving around in realms of textuality, so it’s refreshing to see that world in a movie. A rare treat.

I learned about this video from a geek friend, that is, in a non-Anthropology context, so the SM screenshot and anthropology stuff came as a joyous surprise. It was a bit eerie at first, but then so cool to see this posted to YouTube from a professor of cultural anthropology. w00t, as they say in some circles. It’s a good day for cultural anthro when work like this gets such visibility.

By: orange.

orange. — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 15:52:33 +0000

“I used CamStudio, a great little free program”

Cool. This is what I was asking myself when watching the clip last night.
Also I thought the movie so explicitly transports a certain position. But the only critique apart from content mentioned position that one could discuss is that the clip is a little too long.
Great work! Finally I know what a videoessay is.
And uses of said program for online ethnography purposes I can think of excite me. thx for sharing.