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Big Data’s Other Dangerous Video

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Source: Big Data

Big Data is an American electropop music project of Brooklyn-based producer Alan Wilkis and friends. Big Data explores contemporary themes involving humans and their growing dependence on and general distrust of technology, especially the Internet.

Big Data is best known for its single “Dangerous”, from the debut 2013 EP 1.0 and the debut 2015 studio album 2.0. The single features Rochester, New York indie band Joywave, with vocals being performed by the band’s lead singer Daniel Armbruster.

Watching the music video below reminded me of Kansas State University professor Michael Wesch’s video from eight years ago. My previous post mentions Dr. Wesch and his ideas about emergent Web 2.0 technologies. Now, here was a music video that illustrated just how far our use of those technologies has progressed in a timeframe of less than a decade!

While it’s not the most famous version of the “Dangerous” single, the Internet is the subject of the music video below. It is a lyric video created by SCANTRON and Greg Yagolnitzer. It’s vaguely NSFW because of blurry bits.

Web 2.0 Welcome To The Machine

Oldest Website

Oldest Website was Tim Berners-Lee’s Website at CERN

It’s been about 17 years since Tim Berners-Lee developed the World Wide Web while working at CERN and about 12 years since Marc Andreessen developed Netscape Navigator.

The Web has, for the most part, followed the path of every other breakthrough in communications technology: copy the conventions of the previous leading technology before exploring the innovations that make the new one unique, e.g., early radio programs sounded like people reading aloud from books and early television programs looked like theater plays. Early websites looked like pages out of a notebook or a magazine. Usually, we had to wait until the new technology reached a stage where it gained enough infrastructure in order to enjoy its full potential.

Hopefully, the Web has reached that stage in its development, a stage that Tim O’Reilly calls Web 2.0. Instead of passively reading someone else’s notebook or magazine, a Web 2.0 site may allow us to interact and collaborate with each other and create content in a virtual community.

Michael Wesch's video The Machine Is Us/ing Us

Michael Wesch’s video The Machine Is Us/ing Us

Kansas State University professor Michael Wesch created a video for his students that illustrates these Web 2.0 ideas using the very tools that he talks about. Towards the end of the video, Professor Wesch raises some important thoughts about how advances in technology might effect us as we rethink such concepts as identity, ethics, privacy, and copyright.

Incidentally, the article that briefly shows up in Dr. Wesch’s video is by editor and writer Kevin Kelly and is about the development of a global brain. The article is We Are The Web and appeared in Wired magazine.