This commentary is about the video “Web 2.0…The Machine is Us/Ing US” by Mike wesch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE&feature=channel
The author, using real screens in a very creative way, leads us to a transformation from written to digital texts, which is provocative as he suggests imagination turned in virtual.
Written text is linear. Is it an affirmation or a provocation? And then, it goes to text is said to be nonlinear. Is it true, maybe due to the reader's trip on a vessel of imagination?
And then...digital text, different, real nonlinear, no need for vessels to getting the reader through an imaginary trip, the movement is for real from one part of the text to another or to a new text anywhere.
The digital text is flexible as it is no longer a block. It can evolve to a more comprehensive subject expanded from selected words (as links) or to a more qualified one looking carefully at a detailed explanation from them. It is virtual, it is made of texts and links and at most of the time has no limits and no size.
And the author leads us further again, nominating the absence of text structure and subject limits as hyper, about all, hypertext, and it is a milestone for web 2.0 because it is the base of HTML, the language of the websites, which started from text form and content editing to sophisticated websites creating.
From this point on, the author leads us to an accelerated race to unlimited data interchange between sites, starting with the creation of XML, which separate text content from text form, allowing information interchange in the network turned in World Wide Web (WWW).
And then, information recovery, how can WWW navigators find information? TAG appears as the solution to reach data, which is very nice but not the whole thing, it is the beginning.
The author, in extraordinarily simple construction, explains that tags we created feed a back database to WWW, so we are teaching the machine and when we create a link, we are teaching it an idea. So, we are the machine and it is a big one as 100 billion times per day we click on a web page.
Finally, the author invites us to think about Web 2.0 as a way to rethink believes from copyright, authorship, identity, commerce to love, family, ourselves.