Dr. Michael Wesch communicates his opinions of the how the digital world is evolving in the short video The Machine is Us/ing Us. Wesch describes very early in the video how our idea of technology has changed over time and that it continues to transform who we are, how we use it, and how it "uses" us. When the web was young, people designed codes to control the structure of a web page but we evolved it to do more. Since form and content could not be separated in that format, computer scientists created XTM. It allowed form to be manipulated in any way the author desired. It became much easier for the user to upload data to the Internet. At one point in the video, Wesch effectually states that with everything we do on the Internet or with technology, it learns. He is trying to get the point across that everything we do to simplify technology for us also makes it more complicated internally and if we are not careful, it can turn bad for us. In conclusion, Wesch got his point across in a way that described in a detailed way, how we drive our progression in technology and that we are truly The Machine.
The video The Machine is Us/ing Us by Dr. Michael Wesch confused me a great deal because I did not know the context in which I was supposed to view it and since I do not know very much about computer technology I was lost half of the time. Watching the video gave me the impression that the author knew a lot about the topic of the video which relieved my distrust from not knowing what he was doing. In the video, near the end, he shows a paragraph that describes technology with a Machine that is learning with everything we do and ultimately that we are what drives the machine. I agree with his concept. I feel that if we do create a computer that is so technologically advanced that it can exceed the power of the human brain like Karl Fisch’s video Did You Know?, then we would eventually end up teaching it what we care about and what is important to our society and let it learn how it could sneak in and destroy us. We would just be the cause of our own fall. This video had an eye opening effect on me because while I realize the rate at which technology is advancing, I had not realized that people were the driving force of the dangers of technology.
