I recently attended a retirement luncheon for my old boss. Another officer who also worked at the Pentagon while I was there asked me about “the blog stuff.”
I tried to explain that what is happening online is about more than “the blog stuff,” but, being put on the spot, I had a difficult time putting exactly what I was trying to say into words.
Luckily, I don’t need to.
Below is a great video for all you military folks interested in the revolutionary changes that evolutions in Web technology have brought about, referred to as Web 2.0.
And Kudos to Michael Wesch on an outstanding video.
It’s very clever, but it’s long on hyperbole and short on actual information. YouTube, for example, has nothing at all to do with XML.
I was also kind of disappointed to see Kurzweil quoted. He’s a deep thinker and an author of grand metaphors, but too many people take his metaphors too far.
And, speaking as a writer, I think the video totally jumped off the rails when it got to the part about rethinking copyright. Wikipedia is a prime example of a copyright-free environment: at best, it’s mostly useful some of the time. And it only maintains that feeble level of authority because it’s policed by an invisible army of obsessive compulsives.
If anything, the various collaborative experiments of the early 21st century have emphasized the need for authorship. Because we can now see, more clearly than ever, that great works don’t emerge from the froth, at least not in human-like time frames. A million monkeys might produce “Hamlet,” but you’d never find it under the mountain of wastepaper.
I still think it communicates a complex subject in a very concise and elegant way.
I just might be able to explain the interwebs to my parents with this.