Writing Online

Elia Powers’ article “A lesson in viral video” (Inside Higher Ed) looks at how knowledge of Wesch’s video, “The Web is Us/ing Us,” was seen by the initial 10 colleagues to whom he sent the link to 91,000 within two days. Some of the video’s main points are:

The difference between HTML and XML, the formation of blogs and the nonlinear quality of digital text are topics addressed in Wesch’s piece. The title, “The Machine is Us/ing Us,” is a reference to a point made in the video — that we are teaching our computer new ideas every time we click on a link. As Wesch says: “The more we are aware of the machine, the better we can make it serve us.”

And as he writes in the video, “Digital text is no longer just linking information. The Web is no longer just linking information. The Web is linking people.”

Wesch said the video is meant to remind the programmers and techies that they have a “profound impact on societies” with their ability to write open source software. He said it’s also intended to remind the policy wonks and politicians who debate Internet privacy and copyrighting that “the media we are responding to is constantly changing.”

One point to keep in mind throughout the semester is how the technology we use affects our writing, whether on a static website, blog, or something else. Jon Udell writes about the “unintended consequences of syndication“. He had created a widget on his blog to post his recent del.icio.us bookmarks, and it changed how he bookmarked:

If you do decide to explicitly publish your bookmarks in a sidebar widget on your blog, it may change the way you bookmark. It did for me, anyway. The balance shifted away from purely personal information management and toward the kind of editorial sensibility that governs the blog. It was around this time that private bookmarks became available in del.icio.us, and that’s been helpful. If I’m researching something and I just want to collect a list of resources labeled with some obscure tag meaningful only to me, there’s no need to flow that stuff onto my blog page. Conversely, if I want to draw attention to something in a public way, I can. It sounds great in principle, but in practice I think the friction involved in making that choice on a per-item basis made me less likely to bookmark either publicly or privately.

Have you noticed whether any of the technology we’re using has influenced your writing?