Via Micah Sifry from the Personal Democracy Forum conference:

“Here’s the video of Michael Wesch’s keynote talk from the second day of Personal Democracy Forum 2009. Wesch, a professor of anthropology at Kansas State University, first gained acclaim as the author of ” The Machine is Us(ing) Us,” a video about how the internet is changing society (that has been viewed more than 9 million times), and I was thrilled that we were able to get him to speak at PdF this year.

I don’t think I’m giving anything away when I note that Wesch’s talk was clearly the favorite of conference goers–72% rated it among their top three presentations, and he got one of the two big standing ovations earned by conference keynoters. He artfully sketches a picture of modern culture, where individuals consume mass media, powerful institutions rule their lives from a distance, and anomie and disconnection are the norm (citing everyone from Neil Postman and Marshall McCluhan to the trajectory of the words “whatever” and “meh”). But then he asks whether the new mass practices of uploading, remixing, commenting and sharing media–where we ARE the media–might be enabling a different, more genuinely connected and hopeful culture to form.

Personally, I think we don’t know the answer but Wesch’s talk both sharpened the question for me and helped frame more clearly how we think about this debate. “

Here’s the video: