A lovely creation on the power of XML and all that follows it in our 2.0 world by Michael Wesch of Kansas State University.

It’s cheerleader-y, but I don’t mind that actually, after months of trying to critically deconstruct what’s wrong with Web 2.0, it’s nice to be reminded of its history a little bit, what’s good about it, and how far we’ve come. It’s not even that I believe that it’s inherently much easier for the average individual to create a web document today than it was 10 years ago, but rather that the documents that are created now are more X (colorful, complete, modular, mappable, etc…) and that perhaps people are more inclined to share information in this way. This is a nice reminder of that.

The content of the video aside, its a wonderful example of how narrative is growing and changing, able to incorporate more and more, unlike the painfully plodding instructional/promotional videos of 20 years ago (See the brilliant Eric Fensler (of GI Joe remix PSA fame)’s lesser known works Don’t Mess with Illinois and Sales and Company Image Seminar Tape #7 for humorous amalgamations of said painful plodding). If forms like video games are opening us to new ways to think about narrative (as I believe they are), this might bring us closer to some of the promises about hypertext creations that have long been in the works and rarely fulfilled outside of the art realm. And of course, that’s the whole point of the video, right?

Originally posted at Savage Minds
Shared by DJ Ripley