have you come across this video yet?

29 August 2009


Here is a video that is at once dark, intriguing, and stimulating: it's called Epic 2015. Have you seen it yet? It looks at our use of the internet and the blurring boundaries between personalization and power. Go see it--it's only about ten minutes long.

What did you think?

Media does influence the way we work and think, and it is good practice to consider how the internet affects us now and how it might affect us in the future. For example, consider how the telegraph changed our discourse and the way we relate to information (see Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman for the original presentation of this concept). News was no longer limited to proximity, in a sense resulting in the “annihilation of space,” as Postman calls it. By and by, information became delocalized, more abundant, and, consequently, less relevant (frankly I’m not as affected by something that happened to someone I’d never heard of who lives somewhere I’ve never been as by reading about something that happened to the woman I see every week when I buy my groceries). This video addresses that problem we face of information inundation and trivialization with its focus on the fabricated “Googlezon,” a merge between Google and Amazon that allows for total customization of content that, in a sense, makes irrelevant information relevant again. Its intriguing presentation seems to address the need for balance between customization and privacy.

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