yet another video from michael wesch

John notes that while everyone is paying attention to Michael Wesch’s video A Vision of Students Today, not many are linking to or showing Internet Revolution, which (and I agree with him) John says is much more of a follow up to The Machine is Us/ing Us.

I really like this video as well, but one statement is bothering me: that there aren’t “material constraints” to organizing and writing information on the web. This seems to ignore the materiality of Internet usage. Chris Villemarette, who graduated with an MA from OSU in 2006, argued in his MA thesis that online communication is necessarily material: it involves the material movement and storage of information, despite our imagined perception that the information is “virtual reality.” He writes, “Digital artifacts are of particular interest because, despite the Internet being often described as a ‘virtual world,’ it is primarily material” (21-22, emphasis his, pages refer to the print library copy).

While there certainly are less material constraints on digital information, I don’t know if we can say there are no material constraints….