It's Alive!

Professor Wesch gave his clever video an equally clever and intriguing title: “The Machine is Us/Using Us.” I think he may have wanted us to consider the dichotomy.

“The Machine is Us” refers to the user generated content of Web 2.0. As pointed out in Courtney, wikis, blogs, and You Tube videos are all contributed by the user, which Berners-Lee points out was the intent of the web from the beginning: interaction between people. Everything contained on the World Wide Web is contributed by the collective “us.” Thus, Wesch hints through his title that the web is a digital representation of people. What people are interested in, they put on the web. This enables them to be connected to people who are interested in the same things. Information that is valued is contributed to the web. By studying the information on the web, we can glean insight into what society’s values and beliefs are. If an alien race somehow gained access to our wi-fi, say, at an intergalactic Starbucks, they would get a fairly accurate picture of humanity as we know it from what they viewed on the web. It is us: digitized in many different forms. The other version of his title, “The Machine is Using Us,” hints that the computers may have an inherent intelligence of their own.

Wesch points out that every piece of information we put on the web teaches it something new, creates new connections, and makes it smarter. This, however, implies that the web is somehow sentient, which it is not. The web is man-created, and continues to evolve only because humans continue to build onto it. Yes, the web may have similarities to the human brain, with connections between information, information that leads to more information, organization of information, etc., but it is not growing smarter. The web is growing more complex because of the vast amount of content that man continues to add. This version of the title would suggest that the web is somehow manipulating us into contributing data, compelling us to feed its never ending hunger for information. The web is not hungry. We are hungry to organize and access information efficiently. We are perhaps also hungry to create a digital representation of ourselves. We saw Dr. Frankenstein attempt it in fiction, and now we see cloning as reality. The web is us, created by us.