One of the great things about the internet is that information is at your fingertips almost immediately.  This certainly has its advantages whether it’s staying up to date on the news, the Olympics, or following your favorite celebrity. There are so many ways that people can interact with each other online, as pointed out in portions of Michael Wesch’s video. With so many ways to communicate with each other via YouTube, Twitter, Flickr, etc, our culture has definitely changed. With this change, the way that we view creation and consumption has changed as well.

 

In  Jon Udell‘s “Heavy Metal Umlaut” video, it shows how any one person at any given time can create and add information, fact or fiction on websites such as Wikipedia. Though people make changes, a website such as Wikipedia often make corrections rather quickly which eliminates falsities and prevents most vandalism. Udell’s video also shows how a website can quickly develop and the process over a span of three years. This example of usage on the internet shows both creation and consumption.  It shows creation in that multiple users are creating a detailed web page for “Heavy Metal Umlaut”. It also shows consumption because the website was developed from its original one or two sentence page to one with subsections through consumption and edits by users.

 

Michael Wesh’s video, “The Machine is Us/ing Us,” Wesh shows how online, things can be easily shared whether it be your thoughts, a video, pictures, where you are, and more, to include a combination of any of these things. People are certainly more willing to show what they have created to an audience worldwide. As demonstrated in the video, a blog takes a matter of seconds to establish.  With ease of access, users creations, whether they be how to videos, images, thoughts on a blog, are so simple to make that many users take advantage of the opportunity. However, many of these would not be available without creation of others. Just as one person’s video, blog, image, etc, can cause another to start up their own because they frequently used that person’s ‘product.’

The internet itself, I think, is a give and take relationship or even a cycle between creation and consumption. One seems to always be stemming off the other.

I found Michael Wesch’s video to be very fascinating. I especially liked the end of the video where he retyped the different words after “rethink”. It really makes you question everything, every part of your life and how the web has affected those parts. I really liked how the video started out with talking about html and how “text” evolved. It started with text on paper, to digital text, to hyperlinks, to html, and so on.

In response to what Paul had up on his blog about what Ben Huh suggested, I don’t know if I really would consider the third “Creation Triptych” as creation. To make something and to remix something is actually creating something, or so it is in my opinion.

It was fascinating watching Udell talk about the evolution of the “Heavy Metal Umlaut” wikipedia page and its expansion over the years. It started off as this page with a very brief description, and grew into this long page of good, some bad, descriptions and explanations (submissions all made by wikipedia users). It is mind blowing how fast it grew and how, in this case I would argue, consumption drove creation.

 

Last one! The related article can be found here. Only read pages 1-30 please! Social media is prevalent in our everyday lives. It is everywhere, and we can access it from anywhere. This article seeks to show how we consume the internet everyday based on a case study. The Article begins with a summary, showing […]