Scariness Much?

On Thursday, I had my first session for a study led by Otago Polytechnic looking at the digital information literacy needs of tertiary students and staff (more info here.) I am planning to use to project to explore the ways we can use digital information in creating, and reporting on, theatre projects. Whether this may be using digital information in "traditional" theatrical productions or creating virtual performances online. As a corollary aim I am looking at using social networking strategies for creating communities of practice.

Our first session was a basic "hi and welcome" session. We did, however, watch "Epic 2015" on Youtube as a way of considering the implications of Web 2.0 strategies. Incidentally, I think Professor Mike Wesch's "The Machine is Us/ing Us" is a much more useful video for thinking about how the organisation is happening now. And, you can see Prof. Wesch explaining the video here. However, "Epic 2015" looks more towards the future than what we can do now. Incidentally I think it is great the video starts with "it is the best of times; it is the worst of times" since this encapsulates one of the founding premises of the video: we are marching backwards into the future. We can see how things we do nowadays can logically be extended to what will happen in the future.

I think perhaps the most worrying thing about "Epic" is that it envisions a world in which everyone is the creator of authority. One of the problems with the web nowadays is that anyone can publish anything. Some may see this as a good thing but it means that the information out there can be a heap of codswallop. In one way Web 2.0 strategies can be a kind of filter in themselves. You can find information that other people have found useful so this is a partial quality control. What is more, academics now have the chance to reach a much greater audience using things such as blogs or wikis. This helps keep the information out there relevant and, most importantly, "correct."

Although these new strategies have given us cause for thought. For example, we are finding we need to re-evaluate some of our long held perceptions about: authors/authority - although we must remember the author has been dead for quite some time - copyright, ethics etc. Indeed, it seems that Web 2.0 strategies are now allowing digital information to act in the same way as semioticians see language functioning - each utterance carries with it the ghosts of all past, and future, utterances. Now we can organise information as we intuitively organise our language.

Incidentally, as an English student I take a bit of perverse glee in The New York Times reverting back to a printed paper!