I came across a fantastic website the other day, ‘The Johnny Cash Project’ (JCP). The website allows users to recreate one frame for Cash’s music video ‘Ain’t No Grave’, and then compiles the user submissions into one complete production. The result is brilliant. Check it out for yourself:
To those of you clever enough to open that link in a new window and continue to read this while it’s loading, you get a gold star and my insight.
If I may get deep for a moment, this project is valuable not only for its artistic innovation, but it is actually somewhat symbolic of the internet as a whole. The JCP is a collection of small bits of information, which, by themselves, are quite unique and entertaining. You can think of these single frames as web-pages. And once they are put together, they create a visual array which not only contains value in each frame but combines to create an even more stunning overall product. And that’s kind of like the internet. Websites themselves are useful. But when connected together, in the aptly named World Wide Web, the sites become part of something bigger; they combine to create a product which is comprised of its inherently different but equally valued parts.
What really makes the JCP unique is the ability for ordinary users to participate in the creation of the whole. People have a choice to contribute to the overall product, to decide how the final version will look. Similarly, the Web is not a government run initiative, nor does it run solely on the pockets of wealthy businessmen. It’s the sort of place where a pimply undergrad student can create a worldwide network of 550 million users; or a professor and an entrepreneur can begin a project that is gradually documenting the sum of human knowledge (which also sounds like the premise of a good sitcom).
We are not passive users of the internet. Every internet user has the ability to create a part of the World Wide Web. That might be something you hadn’t seriously contemplated before. Every time you upload a photo on Facebook; leave a comment on a newspaper article; publish a blog; edit a Wikipedia article or post in a forum, you are actively adding to the largest collation of human resources the world has ever known. We are not driving on the information superhighway – we are constructing it.
No comments:
Post a Comment