Toward a New Future of Whatever- Michael Wesch

What a great video. Mr. Wesch first started his presentation off by talking about how society amuses themselves to death. He talked about his 200-400 students that he has and showed a picture of his class and compared it to a picture of the American Idol Auditions. He explains that people seem to have no sense of significance. This is true. People seem to feel as though they need to make themselves feel important or significant in order to amuse themselves and be positive about themselves. I see his comparison. I know when I was in college, students didn’t seem engaged and sat in a class just like his and followed along as the instructor spoke; knowing that was the right thing to do. Students are now able to walk and access the Internet at a touch of a button. Mr. Wesch continues to talk about the definition of the word “Whatever”. He explained that before the 1960s “Whatever” meant “That’s what I meant.” In the late 60s, the definition changed to “I don’t care, Whatever.” In the MTV generation he showed an example of the Simpsons and “Meh”. I remember a few of those changes, but this really made me think. People have become self-centered and don’t know how to know themselves.

In my life, I know I say “Whatever” at times. I have tried to sit and think of exactly what I meant by saying it. Mr. Wesch goes on to discuss uTube. Everyday there are over 1,000,000,000 videos uploaded on the Internet. That in itself is a hard fact to grasp. 99.9% of those videos are irrelevant to us. One of the most recent videos that we are all aware of is the “Charley Bit Me” video. People have recreated this video and it has gotten a lot of views. Why is this relevant to us? It’s not. We as humans have come to use this medium, uTube, to communicate to the world. Mr. Wesch’s students made good points when they created their own videos about how they are conscience about how they look before they record themselves, but in reality they are only talking to a camera on a computer. It is too easy to reach the world by using uTube. You may only be talking to a computer, but anyone in the world can view your video. Mr. Wesch had an example of MAD V who is the person that created a very responsive video by writing messages on people’s hand. This was the first actually that I had seen of this. I personally do not stay current with uTube videos.

Every once in a while a friend may show me a uTube video that is funny or something I may like, but I am probably one of the few that don’t keep up with uTube. Watching this video made me realized just how many people upload videos and watch videos each day. Just think about the future. If there are over a million videos uploaded daily now, just think. As a future educator, we as teachers will see many more advancements. I think we will see more than we know. It is an exciting thing if you think about it, but also scary in a way. I know that when I was taking my undergraduate classes at South, we would sit in our classroom and listen to lectures. I am sure some classes are still that way. I took EDM 310 when I was in college. I remember that we would meet in a computer lab and have certain topics to comment about. Now that I am taking this class to renew my teachers certificate I see how much things have changed in five years. This class is now very engaging and has helped me learn a lot!