Information and communication technology is increasingly invading almost every sphere of our lives. We, the 21st century Man are heavily dependent on digital technology to 'function' properly. Does this mean that we are making a transition from being less human and more cyborg? Our new social constructs, are throwing new fundamental questions at us, like, are we using the machine or the machine using us?
Michael Wesch, has posted a nice video on youtube as an explanation to this. He claims that being the creator of the machine, the machine is us. and we are using an extension of ourselves. More can be seen in the video.
In the video, he tries to show digital text is more flexible and easily manipulable than unilateral text on print. He further claims that, "we are the web" when we post something and then tag it, "we are teaching the machine and forge a link, we teach it a new idea".
I just had a related experience earlier today that reminded me of Welsch's video and thus the reason why I'm writing this. Well I was watching a movie, Trick (1999). There was a song in the movie that caught my attention and wanted to check whether it is an existing song. So I just typed the most recurring wordings of the song which are "enter you" on youtube's search bar and amazingly enough, it took me to exactly the same song extract from the movie Trick which someone has posted. Pity I couldn't get hold of the original song and even ignore the fact whether it is an actual song or not. But the point I want to make is how the poster on youtube has taught the machine to respond to the words "enter you" featured in a song and background score; by entering related tag. Only these two words were enough to link it to the movie.
So, this idea of how we teach the machine to respond is what we get to see in Welsch's video and this example from Trick is how I interpret it.
