Dystopia and Discussion

Still weaving up the down staircase: blog posts are not sanctioned until Week 3. But I’m trusting the momentum of my inner learner, and blogging as the discoveries present.

2 memorable discussions this week: one office-mate confessed how strange it seemed to transmute the web-formatted instructions and resources into printouts to be perused as if they’d come from a mid-twentieth century typewriter. Why not digest the ideas in their presenting format? Another colleague joined me in a satisfying chorus of concern regarding the purported wisdom of the crowd. By what alchemy does collected opinion crystallize into veritable wisdom?

Both discussions reminded me of the Youtube clips, Web 2.0: An Intro in 5 Minutes, and What is Web 2.0? Talk about dystopian…saints Orwell and Huxley preserve us! What a chilling sleight of hand, when first we are teaching the machine with each click we register, then in a few brief minutes’ time, we are obliged to begin rethinking our privacy, our aesthetics, our ethics, our identity–in short, all that makes us human.

Hmmm, better strike that last term, for the one fast-moving show informs us that we have become identical with the machine. The other clip soberly proclaims the result of our participation in the social web; we “end users” become subsumed within the application’s data, prepped and fit to be leveraged.