Here’s the video of Michael Wesch’s keynote talk from the second day of Personal Democracy Forum 2009. Wesch, a professor of anthropology at Kansas State University, first gained acclaim as the author of “The Machine is Us(ing) Us,” a video about how the internet is changing society (that has been viewed more than 9 million times), and I was thrilled that we were able to get him to speak at PdF this year.
I don’t think I’m giving anything away when I note that Wesch’s talk was clearly the favorite of conference goers–72% rated it among their top three presentations, and he got one of the two big standing ovations earned by conference keynoters. He artfully sketches a picture of modern culture, where individuals consume mass media, powerful institutions rule their lives from a distance, and anomie and disconnection are the norm (citing everyone from Neil Postman and Marshall McCluhan to the trajectory of the words “whatever” and “meh”). But then he asks whether the new mass practices of uploading, remixing, commenting and sharing media–where we ARE the media–might be enabling a different, more genuinely connected and hopeful culture to form.
Personally, I think we don’t know the answer but Wesch’s talk both sharpened the question for me and helped frame more clearly how we think about this debate. His juxtaposition of the photo of his college lecture hall class sitting bored at their desks with a photo of hundreds of young people eagerly, desperately trying to get onto American Idol makes clear that whatever we PdFers may imagine is the new culture, it’s still mostly a marginal phenomenon. (And given danah boyd’s sobering warning about the emergent class and racial split among online social network denizens, it’s hardly clear that the net affecting America’s deeply ingrained social stratification in a positive way.)
At the same time, we also have many examples of new kinds of social solidarity occurring that are enabled by the net–whether it’s hundreds of thousands of people contributing to Wikipedia or tens of thousands helping spread suppressed news from inside Iran, or grassroots activists in 200 cities rallying over Twitter to raise a quarter million dollars in less than a month for charity: water. A small but significant enough number of us are shifting our time away from passive pursuits like TV and towards the web, where we lean forward to participate rather than lie back to be entertained. That group has a cognitive surplus to burn…
Wesch’s closing question hangs in the air: “How can we use this to conquer the narcissistic disengagement that we see today in a culture that is still ruled by trivialities?”