K-State's Michael Wesch to be honored with Wired magazine Rave Award

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Source: Michael Wesch, 785-532-6866, mwesch@k-state.edu
http://www.mediarelations.k-state.edu/WEB/News/MediaGuide/weschbio.html
News release prepared by: Michelle Hall, 785-532-6415, mhall@k-state.edu

Wednesday, April 25, 2007

K-STATE'S MICHAEL WESCH TO BE HONORED WITH WIRED MAGAZINE RAVE AWARD

MANHATTAN -- J.K. Rowling, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Michael Wesch. These are just some of the 22 winners of this year's Rave Awards from Wired magazine, on newsstands and the Web this week.

Wesch, assistant professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State University, is being honored in the video category and is called "The Explainer" in the issue. He created a video explaining Web 2.0 that has been viewed more than 2.2 million times on YouTube, an online video-sharing community, since its release Jan. 31. Web 2.0 is the so-called "second wave" of Web-based services allowing people to network, share and collaborate online. Wesch's students, through a working group in digital ethnography at K-State, conduct fieldwork on the culture of YouTube.

Wired's Rave Awards salute the "people changing your mind," according to magazine. They honor innovators, instigators and inventors in a range of categories including technology, business, music, film, games, industrial design and blogs. This year's awards process looked at the most "intriguing breakthroughs in the world today" and then tracked down the "individuals who made them happen." Wired reports on how technology affects culture, the economy and politics.

Other 2007 Rave honorees include Harry Potter author Rowling; Gov. Schwarzenegger of California; the creator of the television show "Heroes," Tim Kring; graphic novelist Brian K. Vaughan; director Alfonso Cuaron; and blogger Arianna Huffington. The winners of the Rave Awards will be honored Friday, April 27, in San Francisco.

Wesch is serving as the guest editor of a special issue of Visual Anthropology Review, "Beyond e-Text" and was writing about what can be done with new technology, such as blogs, video editing and social networking sites, when he found himself in a strange position. He was trying to describe how digital media has gone beyond simply imitating paper, but Wesch himself was using paper to describe this phenomenon. Using video instead, he created "Web 2.0...The Machine is Us/ing Us" to describe his path through the Internet. His creation can be seen at http://youtube.com/watch?v=NLlGopyXT_g

The final version of his video "Web 2.0...The Machine is Us/ing Us" premiered at the Technology Entertainment and Design Conference in March.