The Machine is Us/ing Us - We are the Web

This is the video of the week! Everyone is talking about this video, which was created by Professor Michael Wesch and his class of Digital Ethnography students at Kansas State University.

Some of the important statements he makes in this video are:

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Group of University Researchers to Make Web Science a Field of Study - New York Times

Web science, the researchers say, has social and engineering dimensions. It extends well beyond traditional computer science, they say, to include the emerging research in social networks and the social sciences that is being used to study how people behave on the Web. And Web science, they add, shifts the center of gravity in engineering research from how a single computer works to how huge decentralized Web systems work.

“The Web isn’t about what you can do with computers,” Mr. Berners-Lee said. “It’s people and, yes, they are connected by computers. But computer science, as the study of what happens in a computer, doesn’t tell you about what happens on the Web.”

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Web science is related to another emerging interdisciplinary field called services science. This is the study of how to use computing, collaborative networks and knowledge in disciplines ranging from economics to anthropology to lift productivity and develop new products in the services sector, which represents about three-fourths of the United States economy. Services science research is being supported by technology companies like I.B.M., Accenture and Hewlett-Packard, and by the National Science Foundation.

Web science research, said Irving Wladawsky-Berger, a technology strategist at I.B.M. and visiting professor at M.I.T., is “a prerequisite to designing and building the kinds of complex, human-oriented systems that we are after in services science.”

Mr. Berners-Lee and his colleagues at the M.I.T. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab and in

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With initial support from M.I.T. and the University of Southampton, the program will hold workshops on Web science and sponsor research fellowships. “But we also want to educate and train people who can understand and analyze how these huge, complex systems on the Web work,” said Wendy Hall, a professor at the University of Southampton. “That means eventually having undergraduate and graduate programs in Web science.”