I delivered a seminar to the Fusion PR staff last week, and re-played at this session the by-now-famous video by KSU Professor Michael Wesch, the Machine is Us (above), as part of a crash course in the power of Web 2.0 for some of our newer staff. The video is both a beautiful and hypnotic work, and within a few short minutes helps viewers understand what all the excitement is about.
Take a look at this if you haven’t seen it already, trust me, you will enjoy it as have countless others (it rises to the top of the search results when you plug the phrase “Web 2.0” into YouTube).
And, as reports emerged earlier this week (see ValleyWag) of how Wikipedia scooped NBC in getting key details of Tim Russert’s death online hours before the network, I am reminded of how eerily efficient a communications mechanism this new Web has become. Sure, this has implications for PR, as I often blog about, but goes well beyond this field and other communications fields to have a dramatic effect on society at large.
This new Web is equal parts crystal ball (see my post on crowd sourcing news and prediction markets) and the collective subconscious (Wikipedia definition) that Jung said unite’s Mankind – the subconscious made real in software code, routers communications networks, driven by the people who use it, reflecting their thoughts, predictions and obsessions.
