For those of you who haven't seen this, there is an awesome video on Youtube by a cultural anthropology professor about the internet. In fact, here's the video:
Lately (as in class, not in the news) we've been learning about "Web 2.0" - what it is and what (if anything) differentiates it from "Web 1.0". In the book by Courtney (Library 2.0 and Beyond), the first chapter opens with a debate about what Web 2.0 is. Is it really just the web that we watched develop but now all fancied up? Is it being able to do things online (social network sites, online document storage, etc.) that 8 or 10 years ago wasn't possible? Or is it a combination of us as users and the web?
This video, I think, has a very apt title. The machine -- the internet web machine -- is both us, the users, and the internet uses us to improve upon itself. It feels slightly like The Matrix, but without all the computers trying to kill people stuff. Here's how I see it breakdown, and why I think the title works brilliantly.
Part 1: The Machine is Using Us - in the textbook, there are several points made about how the web was designed essentially to connect people. O'Reilly and Berners-Lee both make this point, although they do so in different ways. That connection could be with other people, with ideas, with information - the end doesn't matter as much as the fact that the web was designed to be a facilitator. In order to facilitate the movement on the web better, the "machine" has to learn its users. By learning what we're looking for and how we tend to search for our information, the machine (the search engines/the internet/the "machine") can facilitate the gathering of said information in a more efficient manner. This is how the machine "uses us". Many of the search engines are meant to be intuitive when it comes to looking for information - that's why when you mess up your spelling in a Google search it can be like your like English teacher and say "Did you mean ..." I never thought I'd actually be scolded by Google, but it asks me all the time if I really wanted to look for whatever I typed in to the search engine.
Part 2: The Machine is Us - obviously, someone had to program everything. Tim Bennners-Lee got us started with the www, but it takes manpower to create something as monolithic as the internet. We, the users of the internet, helped with the task. Many of the algorithms that the internet uses are meant to analyze what we do. But someone had to create the program. The internet is a quick study, but it's not that good. And that's where we as users and creators come in. Every time someone creates a new page or makes a new program on the internet, we shape the machine. There's a part of us in what create, and therefore the machine is a reflection of us, making it a version of us.
I think this was pointed out very nicely in Professor Wesch's video. He takes the audience on a ride through our most recent history from paper and pencil to typing on a computer to the creation of web page programming. I think the ending of the video (starting from the 3:20 mark on) is very explicit in why the video has it's name. According to a statistic in the video, people click on 100 billion web links a day. That's billion, with a B. That's 100 billion links that we've looked at, created, potentially commented on, and taught the web to connect to other links. If we could link even a fraction of that quantity of information we'd be geniuses. Instead, we collectively have helped to shape a system that can do this type of thing for us.
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