"2015 Future of StoryTelling Summit Speaker: Michael Wesch, Cultural Anthropologist

A pioneer in digital ethnography, Dr. Michael Wesch studies how our changing media is altering human interaction. As an anthropologist in Papua New Guinea, Wesch saw firsthand how oral storytelling worked for much of human civilization: It was a group activity that rewarded participation, transformed our perceptions, and created a changing flow of stories across generations. Reading and writing replaced oral storytelling with linear, fixed stories. Upon returning from Papua New Guinea, Wesch created the 2007 viral video hit Web 2.0...The Machine Is Us/ing Us, about the Internet's effects on our culture. At FoST, he’ll explore how our evolution from a literate culture to a digital one can return us to collaborative storytelling, resulting in a more engaged, participatory, and connected society."

In 2004 the most common word pairings in articles included “college students” and “waste time,” as articles focused on Facebook's founding at Harvard and its massive rise across college campuses. The most common bigrams that appear in news articles throughout Facebook's adolescence mostly focus on keywords like “college students,” “Silicon Valley,” and “social networking,” as journalists charted its rise. Then, in 2008, Hovde's analysis shows a spike in articles about politics; across all four p...

Julia Sonnevend/Public Seminar, March 6, 2018.