Teaching the Machine

I like this video for a number of reasons. It’s text speaking about text speaking about content, and has no aural commentary. It uses real imagery yet is figurative; it connects the edge of an arcane concept (hypertext markup) to the edge of some very big issues (love, communication and copyright) yet makes this connection clear in just a couple of minutes. It’s produced by an academic and appears on YouTube – it’s about Web 2.0…

But most of all I think it sums up why I’m interested in the Internet, and why I’ve always been. Whenever I encounter stuff like this I repeat the words that I saw on a sig on a random email on a random BBS on the end of a random 9600-baud dial-up somewhere in London in 1993:

“Death to the communications monopolies! May ten thousand autonomous systems bloom!”