As I viewed the YouTube video about Web 2.0 by Professor Michael Wesch, I thought, “Wow! There’s a lot of information here and it’s moving pretty quickly from one thought to another," a bit overwhelming, actually. So after watching it a few times I thought about the question- What was Wesch trying to say when he entitled it “The Machine is Us/ing Us”? Why did he give that name to his video? I think he meant that the Web 2.0 tools that people all over the globe are using “is us” because it’s all about people connecting with each other and the world around them through the many social networking tools like Facebook, Myspace, and Twitter, to name a few. It allows anyone to show their creative abilities and allows for self-expression through avenues like personal Web sites, blogs, Flickr, and Image Chef. It allows people to collaborate on projects when they aren’t even in the same room, city, or even country with tools like Wikis and Google Docs. It’s amazing how web 2.0 tools have brought the people of the world so much closer together-- “us”.
The “using us” part was explained when he said that every time we make a new connection we are teaching the machine. Imagine millions of people are making millions of connections day after day! The machine needs us to change and grow, like a brain needs information flowing over neuropathways to function, learn, grow and cause change—The machine is “using us”.
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