I saw a couple of interesting videos on YouTube in the past day. The first–”Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us”–was produced by Prof. Michael Wesch and the Digital Ethnography working group he leads at Kansas State. This video tells the history of how we got to Web 2.0, and what it means for the way we communicate and think.

The second–”Epic 2014″–was produced by Robin Sloan and Matt Thompson while they were fellows at the Poynter Institute in 2004, and is described as a “future history of the media.” This piece gives a brief history of the corporatization of the web, and projects forward to a time when new media has brushed traditional media, such as the New York Times, into the dustbin of history.

These videos have a lot in common, most of all that they place us in the middle of a revolution that has changed the rules of communication. The first video revels in the promise of this evolution towards connectedness, while the second provacatively envisions a Philip K. Dickian (or Dickensian) future where every human is his/her own editor and where machines write news stories; it argues we may be overconnected in the future. Still, a central truth runs through these pieces; that is, Web 2.0 challenges and threatens to upend traditional notions of authority.

Has what it means to “read critically” changed, or is it just the texts that have changed? We’ve devoted much energy here to discussing how these new rules have affected the academy. If the future as envisioned in the second video is plausible, should colleges be responsible for explicitly integrating some form of media studies into their core curricula?

I think that we need fundamental changes in primary education (and I’m hardly the only one!). New generations of students approach this world organically, and not often in a critical or discerning matter. By the time they get to college, their stance towards media is already developed. How should society educate them into this environment? And what implications for nation, community, and citizenship does this new connectedness have? A crucial starting point, I believe, is to find ways to level the digital divide in K-12 education. Any new education policy that emphasizes equality of opportunity must begin with that. I’m not particularly hopeful on that front, for historical reasons.

These videos taken together remind us that technological progress, especially as it relates to connectedness, is distinct from social progress. We should welcome Web 2.0, but we should also realize and respond to the implications of its ascendency. We should use the tools to teach, but we should also teach about what it means to use the tools.