::::::::
I met the speaker, Michael Wesch, assistant Professor of Digital Ethnography at Kansas State U. at the 2009 personal democracy forum conference.
Wesch talks about now, in addition to literacy, we have "videracy" and how the new web technologies are about ways of linking people, how every six months, there's a new tool out there that does it in a new way. He says that when the media changes, we change, citing Marshall McLuhan,
"We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us."
He discussed Neil Postman's take on how truth would be affected by the media ecology-- an Orwellian concealment of truth through the use of 1984 style Newsspeak, like Frank Luntz espouses, or a Huxleyan Brave New World vision, where truth is drowned out in irrelevance. Postman said, in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death, that reality was reflected more by Aldous Huxley's Brave New World where the public was oppressed by pleasure than Orwell's 1984 where they were oppressed by pain.
Wesch, at the conference, also gave a brief history of the use of the word, WHATEVER. More on that below.
So, back to the brief history of Whatever
Pre-1960 Whatever would be used, in a statement like, "Whatever-- that's what I meant."
In the late 1960's, Whatever meant "I don't care."
In the 1990's with MTV and The Simpsons, Whatever meant, "Meh" as indifference.
By 1992, Whatever developed a narcissistic side to it, as in "Whatever, I'll do whatever I want."
And Wesch wraps up with the hopeful observation that perhaps we'll use the word to talk about doing whatever it takes to make this a better world.
If you like this one, the most popular one he's done is:
9,603,150 views
