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Thanks to ckelty at Savage Minds for the tip.
Those are good points. When I think about raising my own kids I certainly would not think to put them in front of a screen somewhere and let "the Machine" do the work for me. I agree that learning is much more effective in face-to-face communication and actual everyday practice.
I wonder how the message that we are learning faster came through in the video, as that was not what I intended. I do think that we are collectively producing and sharing knowledge faster than ever before, but as individuals I don't know that we are learning faster, and certainly the medium could work against this. In the article I cited, "We are the Web," Kevin Kelly notes that the Web is already used as our memory, an observation that seems to echo the critique of writing given by Socrates.
Mike
Thank you very much for coming over and responding. I appreciate it.
As for the word "gimmicky", what I should have said, with more politeness and precision, was that by the end of the essay, the word and visual play seemed to overwhelm whatever meaning you intended.
Having said that, your statement that you were presenting the "landscape" makes some of what seemed excessive to me more understandable. I do not see many video essays, and I had no idea that this one had a second life in an interactive environment. Perhaps a more experienced reader (viewer? what is the right word?) would have understood your landscape for what it was.
"If you read unrestricted optimism into the video, perhaps I need to rethink my presentation."
I don't think it was optimism so much as what seemed to me a considerable overstatement of the interactions that occur online.
The web does make possible new and faster means of communication and interaction, but I found implicit in your essay the idea that the acceleration of that interaction was being matched by an acceleration of our ability to learn from that interaction I don't think that is true.
Yes, one can learn to understand more quickly the new minglings of words and images. Adults learn it as a new language and therefore, often haltingly. Kids learn it more naturally and as we all know move more fluently and therefore faster within it.
But I am not sure that the increased speed and fluidity of communication reflects an acceleration in the ability to learn, to consider, and then to respond more intelligently.
And that, to me, is the crux of communication. It is not simply the interaction, as joyful as that can be. It is what we as individuals take from that interaction, whether it be new ideas, new perspectives on old ideas, joy, sorrow, whatever.
I felt that behind your essay was an assumption that learning had accelerated along with the medium. As I indicated in one of my posts above, while we can find answers to specific faster, I don't know that we think about the consequences of those answers any better or any faster.
But perhaps I have misunderstood you.
At any rate, thanks again for stopping by.
Oscar,
You begin your comments by using words like “respectfully” but then you use words like “gimmicky” in your title that discount and cheapen the amount of thought and effort that I put into the creation of the video. This strikes me as against the ethos I think we would all like to create as we increase our use of these various technologies of collaboration. If you have a substantial comment you would like to make, you can do so without such terms. If you read the video description on YouTube you will see that it is a second draft and I will be doing a final draft soon, so I am open to substantial comments.
Some of your comments seem to contradict one another. At one point you seem to be saying that it is too fast-paced for anybody to actually retain the information. At another point you suggest that there really isn’t that much information at all. As for the first point, note that the video can be watched over and over again if the viewer can’t retain all of the information the first time. As for the second, you are entitled to your opinion, but note that many of the observations and critiques being made here were actually carefully placed in the video to allow people with a critical eye to draw those conclusions themselves (such as text in boxes and the reading of one word at a time bit). If you read unrestricted optimism into the video, perhaps I need to rethink my presentation. I am only trying to give some illustration of the landscape so that we can all begin to navigate it with more awareness.
As for your point about the video making people into passive consumers, consider that the video is posted on Mojiti where the “consumer” can actually write on top of the video. It is also downloadable with a CC license that allows others to re-make it to illustrate their own points or counter my own however they like. It is true that during the 4:31 seconds of the video you are a passive consumer (if you are watching it on YouTube and not Mojiti). That’s the medium, not me. And that’s the point. Different media have different possibilities and restrictions. The more we are aware of these possibilities and restrictions, the more we can use the media rather than allowing them to “use us.” We have so many options available to us now for expressing our ideas, we haven’t even begun to recognize them.
I respectfully disagree with your last point. While the opening does focus on text creation, toward the end the video states "the web is linking people". That linkage is incomplete without consumption.
The whole aesthetic of the video essay is designed to give the viewer/reader a sense of being integral to the creation process. We become part of the music, part of a rapid, somewhat hypnotic theme and variation of text and image. By the end we are part of the seamless 2.0 whole.
But that's not true, at least not in the case of this video essay. We are simply consumers. Part of the point I was making is that we can only consume so much in any period of time, and our comprehension and retention (or digestion) of the information is even slower.
A point I did not make before but will add now. The video seems like it is highly compressed. In fact the opposite is true, there is very little information in it. Whether it is worth the time depends on whether its aesthetics also communicate something essential and true.
I doubt its truth.
Oscar, For the life of me, I can't imagine what "putting on one's pants one leg at a time" has to do with it; and the video essay had more to say about the creation of text than its consumption.
More data may be at our finger tips, but do we really learn more in a single day?
The speed with which you can find the relevant information is increased (though so is the speed with which irrelevant information is created)
I think you're right about how gimmicky it gets towards the end, because it's no long using the technology, but just writing text into its boxes. It also misses huge shadings and problems with the web 2.0 approach, as exemplified in projects like wikipedia and phenomena like the googlebomb.
I also have some quibbles with the xml/html distinction that he draws, because there are common elements between them, and html itself is machine-independent and platform independent, which was itself a radical step forward; xml achieves its exportability by sacrificing certain elements....
It started out neat, particularly the use of revisions to expand upon a point. But then it got old. (Philip Glass music often has the same impact on me)
More data may be at our finger tips, but do we really learn more in a single day? Or does the interconnection simply encourage us to learn something different?
Or do we learn less? If you just watched the video essay and then read this, how much of the essay did you retain?
Finally: The video essay made me intensely aware of this:
we still put pants one leg at a time, and we still read one word at a time.
It's really interesting to see what someone who's not wholly immersed in 'web 2.0' thinks about this video. I saw it a while back and it made perfect sense to me; I thought Mr Wesch had done a wonderful job explaining such an elusive concept. But in retrospect I think it's because I'm already so attuned to its message through my familiarity with the ideas, language, HTML etc. I'm inside the discourse, so to speak :)