In an interesting twist, I was looking to the past and discovered a link to the future.

A long time ago I spent a year at a University in the States. The most memorable part of that year was falling in love with computers and computer programming. This was in the era of punch cards and batch processing. Instant gratification? What’s that? I could take days to write a program and hours to run it (or have it fail to run due to a simple typo).

But I got into computers through a special class, “Introduction to Urban and World System Dynamics”. At the heart of the class was the study of something called “The World2 Software Model.” This was a very early attempt to understand how civilization interacted with the world. It was the predecessor to the “Club of Rome’s” climate model, and so the predecessor to many of today’s models.

Anyway, I studied it, learned BASIC, FORTRAN IV, and Assembly all in the space of half a year. And I re-wrote the original model because I felt it was flawed.

However, I went off just recently looking to see if anyone still had the software wandering around on the internet, preferrably ported to some modern language (Java).

Somehow, I found Michael Wesch and his Digital Ethnography of Kansas State University. I found him through his equally engrossing World Simulation Project which wasn’t quite what I was looking for but seems far more interesting in its own right. Certainly, from what little I’ve seen, the students at Kansas State University are lucky to have his course offerings and, in a world of infinite money and infinite time, I’m pretty sure I’d arrange to have myself sitting in on one of his World Simulations!

But all this is only in preparation to the point of this posting.

Dr. Wesch is a cultural anthropologist who, among other things, decided to study the whole youtube.com phenomenon. And he produced a presentation for the Library of Congress which he (naturally) posted on youtube.com.

What intrigues me most about this whole engrossing 55+ minute presentation is a remark he included from Lawrence Lessig’s TED talk of 2007 (here) in which Lessig points out that our current laws of copyright are creating a culture among our kids where they, in order to be creative in their own right, see the laws as an obstacle to overcome and therefore are encouraged to act as criminals.

And that’s a scary proposition.

I highly recommend checking out Dr. Wesch’s video and also Dr. Lessig’s TED talk.