My friend, Keith, posted this video on his blog. I had to echo it, because it looks like a good find. The youtube video has 24 segments and is intended to be shared.

Please post your thoughts as comments. I’ll start this conversation with a question.

How can the world hope to continue sustaining life while thousands upon thousands of corporations each independently fulfill their own agendas by taking the world’s resources with no heed for the collective future outcome of the global community?

As a child born the same year that Darth Vader made his debut on the silk screen, I was both intrigued and apalled during my latest trip to K.B. Toys. In the front of the store was a collection of Star Wars toys. Interested in what James will probably play with as a kid, I ran across the latest toy:

The Star Wars Transformer.

At first glance, that’s either the coolest thing ever or the wierdest. The coolness of the toy is that you get both Vader and his spaceship in one toy. If that’s not cool enough, get the Luke Skywalker rebel alliance action figure. Now you can have hand-to-hand combat AND fight each other with blasters too.

On the other hand, the wierd part about the Star Wars Transformer is that the characters of Star Wars and the characters of Transformers are based on two completely different mythologies. A modernist would be throwing up in the toilet even thinking about it. After all the ideal of modernism is purity of style and story.

The postmodernist has no problem with a toy of this nature though. The juxtaposition of these two seemingly contradictory things rather than explained away are allowed to simply coexist, even encouraged. After all, you end up with an incredibly awesome toy!

I kind of waver between these two worlds. On one hand having discrete pure toys is a good thing. On the other hand, if all you care about is having some fun, why not combine them in one.

In internet technology the closest thing to this idea of juxtaposition is the Web 2.0 idea of the mash-up. The basic idea is to pull content from other sites into yours and vice versa. As you combine different data sources, you form a hybrid between the two. In fact two of the biggest internet companies, Google and Yahoo, are actually encouraging this behavior by asking outside programmers to hack their site.

Juxtaposition. It’s bigger than you think.