The Machine is Us/ing Us. Or, are we encouraging it?

 In the Machine is Us/ing by Michael Wesch, we see a form of transformation - from simple HTML to stylistic ones that intertwined form and content to be "inseparable," as the video describes. It shows how everyone that is digitally inclined, is also connected with each other. Upon viewing The Machine is Us/using Us, it sparked a memory of a documentary I watched in my Approaches to Mass Communication class called "Generation Like."

As an avid user of social media, PBS opened my eyes to an entirely new perspective of social media, marketing and the evolution of technology in general. Considering my major in Communication and minor in Business, I often am exposed to the ethics side of technology and the business side. While many people don't think twice about clicking "like" on Facebook or retweeting a tweet on twitter, businesses utilize those actions to help them generate awareness for their brands and eventually, profits. The power of technology is both fascinating and alarming at the same time. At the end of Wesch's video, he ends with the sentence: "We'll need to rethink a few things..." and one after the other, these words appear: copyright, authorship, identity, ethics, aesthetics, rhetorics, governance, privacy, commerce, love, family and ourselves.

In relation to Generation Like, the word ethics stands out to me. Generation Like shows how everyday consumers are used as marketers, specially through social media platforms. With every like, share and re-tweet clicked on, we as consumers are creating awareness and profits for a brand, new movie and etc. - without even knowing it! While many consumers, specially younger individuals, thrive in the satisfaction of likes or shares, they are unaware that their actions are a form of marketing. The thought of ethics comes into mind - is it ethically right that consumers are used as marketers, commentators, innovators (the list can go on and on)? Just as the title of the video says, The Machine is Us/ing Us - we are being used as technology evolves. But are we being used or are we encouraging the machines to use us?