Michael Wesch
PopTech 2009
Michael Wesch’s first experiment with digital ethnography, Nekalimin.net, was posted in 1999 and has been hailed by his peers as “by far and away the most interesting web-mounted hypermedia ethnography to date.” Studying how new media shapes culture has preoccupied Wesch ever since his dissertation on the effects writing brought to a remote area in Papua New Guinea. Now Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University, Wesch continues to explore how form impacts content.
Wesch furthered his exploration of mediated culture by releasing a 4:32 min. video on YouTube entitled, “Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us” in January 2007. It has since been viewed over 10 million times. His video work has garnered Wesch numerous awards, including a Wired Rave Award and the John Culkin Award for Outstanding Media Praxis from the Media Ecology Association.
In 2008, Wesch was asked to present “An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube” at the Library of Congress. His acceptance speech for the 2008 U.S. Professor of the Year Award, presented by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, has been viewed on YouTube 28,637 times and counting.