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Michael Lee Wesch (born June 22, 1975) is
assistant professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State University.
Wesch's work also includes media ecology and the emerging field of
digital ethnography,
where he studies the effect of new media on human interaction.
Wesch is a cultural anthropologist and media ecologist exploring
the effects of
new media on human interaction. He graduated summa cum laude
from the Kansas State University Anthropology Program in 1997 and
returned as a faculty member in 2004 after receiving his PhD in
Anthropology at the University of Virginia. There he pursued
research on social and cultural change in Melanesia, focusing on
the introduction of print and print-based practices like mapping
and census-taking in the Mountain Ok region of Papua New
Guinea where he lived for a total of 18 months from 1999-2003.
This work inspired Wesch to examine the effects of new media more
broadly, especially digital media.
To this end, Wesch is launching the Digital Ethnography Working
Group, a team of undergraduates exploring human uses of digital
technology. Coinciding with the launch of this group, Wesch created
a short video, "Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us." Released on
YouTube on January 31, 2007,
it quickly became the most popular video in the blogosphere and was
viewed over 10 million times. Wesch has won several awards for his
work with video, including a Wired Magazine Rave Award and the John
Culkin Award for Outstanding Media Praxis from the Media Ecology
Association.
Wesch's videos are part of his broader efforts to pursue the
possibilities of digital media to extend and transform the way
ethnographies are presented. Wesch is also a multiple award-winning
teacher active in the development of innovative teaching
techniques. Most notably, Wesch has developed a highly-acclaimed
"World Simulation" for large introductory classes in cultural
anthropology. On Nov. 20, 2008, CASE
and the Carnegie
Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching honored Wesch as
Professor of the Year.[1]
Currently he is the coordinator for the Peer Review of Teaching
Project at Kansas State University, part of a broader nation-wide
consortium of universities pursuing new ways to improve and
evaluate student learning. He is also working with the Educause
Center for Applied Research on "The Tower and the Cloud" project,
examining "the question of how higher education institutions (The
Tower) may interoperate with the emerging network-based business
and social paradigm (The Cloud)."
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