Viewing some of my monthly subscription videos for National Geographic on YouTube, I came across a special edition National Geographic video of Dr. Michael Wesch of Kansas State University, titled “The Future of Communication”. It captured my attention from the start as he was describing his experience in Papua New Guinea. The region in PNG that he studied was extremely isolated even more so than Bougainville, the place where I grew up. It was up in the highlands and he stayed in huts without electricity. But during a 10 year period he was able to witness a transformation in PNG. This transformation occurred with the introduction of writing, leading him to understand the relationship between media and relationships; media mediate relationships and when media changes so does relationships.

Dr. Wesch studies anthropology, which is the social science that studies the origins and social relationships of human beings. With his observation of how media can alter society and social relationships, he started to study the new media landscape called Web 2.0. In short Web 2.0 is web development that focuses on two things; users and information sharing. YouTube, wikipedia, blogs, flickr, digg are just some examples of Web 2.0 applications that allow you to share videos, knowledge, information, photos and articles respectively. As more people become connected to the internet and networks become faster and more ubiquitous, Web 2.0 applications will only get more popular.

Understanding how this new media landscape will impact society will help us rethink our outdated ideas, for example current teaching methods, which is Dr. Wesch’s interest. It was while lecturing that he noticed how current teaching methods were not suitable for today’s generation. I have not seen the other videos on his class projects but basically the projects have focused on combining the knowledge of every single student in his class. This new interactivity has let in a breath of fresh air in his classes and achieved impressing results. For his innovation teaching techniques he was awarded U.S. professor of the year in 2008.

The video has made me think about the future of communication and how it will shape everyone’s lives. And to help myself understand I have made delicious, digg and twitter accounts. I can see the definite trends in today’s society; open source software, free knowledge, applications that allow human interactivity, increased connectivity and faster network connections. If a collection of 200 undergraduates can develop ground breaking research, imagine the power of combining the minds of the world. The most popular sites on the web are the ones promoting interactivity; facebook, myspace, wikipedia, file sharing sites, etc. The most popular games are MMORPGs such as WoW. I think Dr. Wesch was right on the future, we will only see an increase in interactivity and faster connections to the internet, which will allow everyone to be connected to everyone instantly. Good or bad? No idea but it will definitely be very interesting.