Imitation, Improvisation, and Performance

The videos shown at this year's 24/7 DIY Video State of the Art screening at the Hammer Museum ended with a succession of video homages to YouTube's famed "JK Wedding Entrance Dance," including the "JK Divorce Entrance Dance" and the "MK Wedding Entrance Dance by Chippendales." This conclusion was meant to provide a feel-good montage of celebratory and irreverent YouTube videos to highlight the theme of this year's event: collective action.

After the lights came up at the end of the screening, Henry Jenkins gave a talk about "How YouTube Became OurTube." (USC's Jenkins was accurately characterized as a "commentator," "participator," and "icon" in fan remix culture in an introduction by Mimi Ito that gave audience members a sense of his importance in media studies and the study of popular culture.)

I'll try to summarize Jenkins' argument for how to understand 24/7 DIY video and then offer a few thoughts of my own, by using my own wedding dance example.

Jenkins and I have differed before, but our exchanges are always friendly, collegial, and supportive. After all, we both ground our arguments in our own community membership, and we both share loyalties to DML Central, scouting, K-12 education, and urban Los Angeles.

I'm interested in potential shortcomings in Jenkins' arguments because I want him to be right not because I want him to be wrong.

(Another person who has been similarly generous in our exchanges is John Palfrey, who opens the "Afterward" of the new edition of Born Digital with a very kind mention of my work.)

Although Jenkins began by reminding the audience that the Google-owned company was controlled by a "proprietary interest," he noted that the "you" of YouTube seemed to be both singular and plural, much as the "you" in "DIY" and "broadcast youself"could refer to both self-branding and collective engagement with community.

He then showed a slide that he often shows to praise the virtues of "participatory culture." Jenkins defines this kind of cultural production by its low barriers to entry, focus on sharing and informal mentoring, and merit-system of contribution and opinion. He also noted that the slide itself was a product of user-generated content, although he didn't cite its precise origin in this presentation.

Then Jenkins granted that "ninety-five percent" of what is on YouTube is "crap," but described such "crap" as "glorious," because people "need a place to be bad and get better." He also showed another slide by Gary Hayes that often appears in talks and blog postings about Web 2.0, although he quibbled with 1995 date for the launch of the web and reminded the audience that his own history of participatory culture goes back to "Web Negative 10" and his interest in toy printing presses used during the Civil War.

Next Jenkins talked about the many fan responses to the Saturday Night Live digital short "I'm on a Boat" that opened the 24/7 DIY video program, which included a capella versions like this and the riding of other kinds of vehicles like Harry Potter-inspired brooms and Yu-Gi-Oh! parodying blimps. (I was sorry not to see my favorite "I Want a Goat" video in the program.)

In introducing "spreadable media," the subject of his forthcoming book, Jenkins explained his own antipathy to the label of "viral ideas" by quoting from Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash and its explanation of the appeal of dehumanizing self-replicating information:

We are all susceptible to the pull of viral ideas. Like mass hysteria. Or a tune that gets into your head that you keep on humming all day until you spread it to someone else. Jokes. Urban legends. Crackpot religions. Marxism. No matter how smart we get, there is always this deep irrational part that makes us potential hosts for self-replicating information.

Jenkins similarly scoffed at using "memes" to describe these phenomena by citing the slavish imitation at work in how Richard Dawkins describes cultural ideas, symbols, or practices traveling from brain to brain. Overvaluing "fidelity," "fecundity," and "longevity" could cause critics to misunderstand the Internet events as they unfold onscreen and the potentially transformative power of seemingly trivial media-making in the moment. He referred members of the audience to Ethan Zuckerman's "Cute Cate Theory of Digital Activism" to support the thesis that "any medium sufficiently powerful to enable the distribution of cute cat pictures can also, under the right circumstances, be deployed to bring down a government."

In characterizing the line-up of videos, Jenkins insisted that they were less about individual expression and more about the collective ethos of participatory culture. After all, he asserted, even the hero of "Where the Hell is Matt" leaves the isolation of his early videos to become part of a gyrating crowd. (Creator Matt Harding was a no-show at the Hammer event, although organizers had hoped to shoot him dancing with audience members congregated around him on the stage.)

Online bystanders like this female vlogger collectively mourned the death of Derrion Albert and the urban violence that took his life with multiple response videos, and anti-homophobia activists generated "fuck you very much" collaborative videos like this one from France. Despite its slick information graphics and use of broadcast news video, Jenkins also thought that the citizen testimonies aggregated in "Why Would Anyone Stop You from Voting?" were also emblematic of this trend.

Jenkins lauded his mentor in the study of popular culture, John Fiske, the subject of a recent conference about his influence on cultural studies, but argued that his ideas about "cultural resources" were born out by Internet practices that he probably couldn't have forseen. At this point, Jenkins cited a few non-YouTube examples, such as the use of altered images of Dora the Explorer in the debate about immigration or depictions of superheroes doing jobs generally done by illegal aliens.

Having interviewed Jenkins in a discussion about the analogy between the online practices and democracy (and the limitations of that analogy), it was interesting to see the theme of "pluralism" being so central to his thought about civic participation. The videorecorded commentary I shot over a year ago mostly focused on the theme of "access."

It was also interesting to see Jenkins looking to film history in a way that he rarely does in his highly accessible public lectures. He noted that Eisenstein was interested in juxtaposition within shots as well as between shots and that fan vidders in the "Deconstructing Our Icons" portion of the program used similar techniques.

Over the course of what he described as thirty years of research on vidding, Jenkins said he had observed how political remix content-creators and fans were learning from each other. He did, however, express concern about the "flow of content," when video of Obama's pastor created for one purpose and audience migrate to use by oppositional camps. Yet in the era of "tactical consumption" Jenkins saw a more global participatory culture for whom the "hallmark is Iran." Even if calling Iranian online activism a "Twitter revolution" is a misnomer that omits certain facts about the role of other technologies and forms of political organization, he credited a culture highly literate in blogging and other diasporic forms of Internet communication.

In understanding what he called "new kinds of political speech" that include Avatar protests on the West Bank by Palestinian activist fans and the latest Glenn Beck Donald Duck mash-up.



Jenkins also used the work of Bolter and Grusin on "remediation" to point out forms of "hypermediation" at work in the DIY 24/7 program, whether it be created with Autotune or multiple windows. Such forms of software use "demystify broadcast media," according to Jenkins, even if the subjects of such videos may seem lowbrow icons like "drama hamster" and "keyboard kat."

Enter "lip dubs" or "lipdubs" into the YouTube search box and Jenkins argued that you would soon find hundreds of examples of "collective joy and mutual performance." With these one-take videos that can be almost as ambitious as the one-shot film Russian Ark, "every environment can become a performance space." (I have embedded a video that wasn't in the DIY 24/7 line-up.)



Jenkins pointed out that the changes wrought by this "OurTube" weren't just about user-generated content. As an example of "grassroots media circulation" of professionally produced broadcast media content, he pointed to Susan Boyle's performance in the same week of the finale of American Idol, which only garnered 40 million views in comparison to the 200 million who watched Boyle's performance on a similar English show online.

As "people sort through a sea" of cultural content, the battle over cultural resources could become complex. Jenkins emphasized two fundamental problems: 1) digital rights and 2) digital inclusion. For example, he noted the imitators of "Limelight" by Rush who jockeyed to get their fingering good enough to lead to an automated YouTube takedown by its matching algorithm until they became involved in a battle over copyright led by Kevin Driscoll (from whom it seems I have less than six degrees of separation) called "Tribute Is Not Theft." Jenkins also raised the question of what's not on YouTube in his conclusion and left the audience to think about a "participation gap" that results in "ideas and diversity we don't see" much like the "systemic bias" in Wikipedia articles where some topics get more digital print than others.

In the question-and-answer session afterward, he reiterated a narrative about the twentieth-century assault on folk culture, which is also familiar to readers of Lawrence Lessig. As Jenkins put it, "my grandmother was a remixer," because she was a quilter who actively participated in a folk culture of reuse and reappropriation. During the twentieth century he charactered fan cultures as "pockets of resistance." He also argued that because Latin America preserved its folk culture in samba schools and carnival traditions, they might embrace "different forms of digital creation" as they go online. He argued that "most artists" were "building on other people's stories" throughout literary history, and that the century which just passed was the exception rather than the rule.

There were also a number of questions about current events and upcoming policy decisions involving cameras in courtroom and net neutrality, which Jenkins saw as critical in "struggles over rights and liberties" that were central to his civic concerns. However, he argued that free and open access to video wasn't always desirable as Sam Gregory of WITNESS has pointed out when the pain of a victim becomes "comedy" or "pornography."

The last word went to a question about remixes out of China and highly coded or indirect forms of political speech that involve Kung Fu Panda material.

There was a video camera recording events at my own wedding, as The Del Rubio Triplets and King Cotton played live music, but the moving images were never digitized much less put online.

I'm a fan of the vast human archive of vernacular dancing on YouTube, but I wonder what it might mean for our celebrations and rituals if everything is to be choreographed for display and replay on the web.

Perhaps there are cautionary tales in both Ondi Timoner's "We Live in Public" and Ian Bogost's "We Think in Public."

The people dancing with me in this photograph are not looking at the camera; the action is meaningful because it is not synchronized; they don't need to be part of a collective. What possibilities for interaction and intimacy would have been foreclosed by enforcing an elaborate choreographed routine? What romance and wistfulness would have been refused?

What if those lip dubs aren't always just about "collective joy and mutual performance"? In what ways are interactions in call centers, chain stores, hospitals, laboratories, schools, military bases and prisons constrained by the rules of neoliberalism and the membership economy and new schemes for scientific management?

For more about Henry Jenkins on this blog and his sparring with Virtualpolitik friend Bogost, see "Who Will Be Voted Off the Island?" For more about the conference in 2008, go here and scroll down.

Captains of Industry

Athough the theme of many of the panels at the conference was DIY tools for digital video media-making, not all of the participants came at the subject from an indie-garage perspective, since the DIY Video Summit included a number of people from industry to add to the mix of academics and activists in attendance.

Marc Davis discussed several U.C. Berkeley/Yahoo! partnerships in his formal presentation and informal comments throughout the conference. Because of the scale of the number of users worldwide, Davis argued that cell phones would be critical in the global multimedia story-telling of the near future, particularly now that image and audio resolution was improving and relationships to "diegetic space" could be facilitated by communication with the computerized tools, such as the tagging of data sent by cell phones with information about the geographical location of the user. Davis showed how the Tag Maps World Explorer prototype could completely automate information from "a collective archive of human attention." In this moment in which "Web 2.0 meets DIY," Davis argued that the questions have become "not just economic or legal" but "also social" and included issues about what Davis called "social compensation" and how "annotation will aid production."

Although corporate discourses about targeted advertising were obviously not that far away, particularly when Davis was thinking about the "range of incentives" available to potential investors in new technologies, Davis argued that entrenched interests of concentrated power would actually be checked by the "sousveillance" practices of users of these mobile technologies, because they could document their counternarratives in service of activist tactics. In the urban environment, in which Davis said we are recorded on average fifteen times a day by the cameras of others, he felt that privacy concerns were misplaced and that automating collective intelligence would ultimately help preserve public spaces and civic activities for participants.
According to Davis, even mobile advertising could be "disruptive in a good way."

Of course, Davis acknowledged that if cell phones were the model for connecting global villages, software development would continue to be a challenge because of the range of proprietary technologies in use by different carriers.

Despite his corporate credentials, Joi Ito claimed to be after no less that the "overthrow of the Japanese government," since there has never been a popular revolution in the country, and he insisted that "even the people who work for the government" agreed that an uprising is needed. He contended that "top-down political interests will corrupt the system" and that "revolution is not about force; it is about information." The issue, Ito said, was "voices not votes."

At the level of technology policy, Ito asserted that it is important to get beyond what Henry Jenkins has called "the black box fallacy" and to accept that what will be produced is "not a single platform," particularly since he argued that innovation is at "the edge not at the center."

He also emphasized a "normative" approach in which he represented himself as a more global citizen than other attendees at the conference. As he put it, "Fair use is very American." In other words, he pointed out what he described as the "parochialism" of the U.S. in focusing on a doctrine designed for defending yourself in court. Besides, he argued, even in the U.S. there are other rights than copyright, such as privacy and publicity rights. Although he didn't sound keen on Egypt claiming a copyright on images of the Sphinx, he did say that being sensitive to the cultural dimensions of the rights of others could be important, for example, by not showing photos of foreign peoples in unflattering ways. He asserted that even within our own country, "you have kids and adults."

On the other hand, Ito is also known as an advocate for an open Internet. He said that ICANN should be wary of law enforcement's desire to know who owns each domain name, since "law enforcement" can wield deadly state violence in authoritarian regimes. As a board member affiliated with Witness, he reminded members of the audience that blogging anonymously with Tor should also be protected in order to publicize human rights abuses.

Room if One's Owned

Lawrence Lessig was unable to attend this weekend's panel on copyright issues at the DIY Video Summit, but there was still a dynamic duo on the issue nonetheless.

Fred von Lohmann of the Electronic Frontier Foundation emphasized the role of political remixes on YouTube and why those remixes should be Constitutionally protected as political speech, regardless of the incorporation of copyrighted material or the disregard of the specific provisions against circumventing copyright protection systems in the DMCA and other forms of legislation. One of the first cases that the EFF had to defend involved JibJab's much-publicized This Land video from the 2004 election, which used a song that turned out to be in the public domain. Ironically, as this panel pointed out, JibJab became a copyright plaintiff against the makers of this video, which originally included a few seconds of JibJab animation that mocked the president.

For more adaptations of this particular work, you can check out the version I prefer, which uses conventions from silent film in its remixing of the Kanye West outburst against the Bush administration during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. As Yochai Benkler pointed out this work combines The Legendary K.O. with Kanye West with Ray Charles in ways that fit James Boyle’s musicological narrative of copyright, borrowing, and culture.



Von Lohmann argued that some of the most pointed critiques, such as the Vote Different video, which parodied Ridley Scott's classic "1984" Apple ad, use brand identities -- and their subversion -- to propagate political messages. He argued that these appropriations should also be considered to be protected speech if they represent satiric uses that corporate copyright owners would never license at any price, such as the gross out "Hurt" video by Sad Kermit.

The biggest laughs came for the showing of this subtle anti-Hillary parody about her "Inner Tracy" that juxtaposes images from Reese Witherspoon's performance in Election with stump statements from the only major female candidate in the race.



Von Lohmann's message overall was a positive one, informed by the Zeitgeist expressed in Jonathan Lethem's "The Ecstasy of Influence." His talk was "less about chilling effect," since the proliferation of these remixes show that regulation doesn’t appear to be working very well. Instead, he argued that "copyright law ironically made it possible," since this content could have never made it on the air and the relatively lax rules for Internet intermediaries under the DMCA freed content providers from the strict liability associated with TV and other broadcast devices, which he described as a "clearance culture" that he claimed was in decline. He argued that rather than monitor media-production with a "velvet rope" that only let a few in, the DMCA encourages a "bouncer approach" in which unruly media-makers who violate laws and norms are ejected from the webcast platform through notice-and-takedown procedures. In other words, "if you’re willing to be sued, you can reach an audience, which is a better deal that you have ever had."

He did, however express concern about "mechanized censorship" by automated filters, which he compared to setting a driftnet that could also catch dolphins. Von Lohmann argued that these technologies were "going to happen no matter what," and he also warned that legislation adding new provisions against bypassing DRM could become a tool for censorship, since the mere fact of rip occasions a fine regardless of how that content is incorporated. Panelists were concerned about the longterm consequences of "trusted systems" and "funky new rights" to creative production and civic participation. Von Lohmann argued that sampling licenses, which now have ten years of practice behind them, sometimes at exorbitant cost, could be seen as "both a bug and a feature."

Yochai Benkler described a somewhat darker narrative about "what freedom might mean and what video might capture" by taking a broader historical perspective, which he did for much of the conference. He began his talk by looking at The New York Herald and the jump in newspaper startup costs that reinvented newspapers to be not something generated locally by political parties but corporate ventures that operated on a business model. Although the message on copyright from Benkler was grim, his attitude about what he described as the decentralization of material and human resources represented important inputs of core economic activities. Thus, as he put it, "social action shifts from the periphery of the economy to a stable element at its core." To understand the significance of this sea change, Benkler looks back to the rise of the administrative state and the emergence of the rationalism of the state.

In the era of Wikipedia, Benkler laughed about the fears that print encyclopedia makers had about Encarta a mere decade ago and how 900 stubs ultimately transformed how average citizens access reference works. Before the Internet, Benkler argued, non-market decentralized action was impossible, although "social sharing" could now be part of a matrix that included traditional elements from price-systems, firms, and government or nonprofit institutions. He claimed that if YouTube resists authority, "that is a good thing," although he agreed with Alexandra Juhasz that it might make it bad for teaching.

In addition to examples of participatory culture that have gotten a lot of attention from Scholars of digital culture, such as the contributions of visitors to The Daily Prophet or Learning to Love You More, Benkler pointed to Kaltura as a prototype for collaborative video production, which can be embedded for Wikipedia. As examples of the potential for non-proprietary rich media production, Benkler showed entries about Venice carnival and Tompkins Square Park. Although Kaltura is currently Flash-based, it hopes to eventually based on the open source free software video format for the web, Gnash.

Benkler also emphasized the whistle-blowing potential for distributed digital media and pointed to Talking Points Memo, Porkbusters, and the Sunlight Foundation as examplars. He argued that the fact that this video content is embedded, often makes it difficult to understand its full impact as a communicative artifact. In this context he mentioned the potential Macaca-moment of John McCain on the campaign trail, which was released on YouTube as "Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran."

Benkler argued that this push back is political and is being fueled by utter disdain for law by millions of people, combined with increasingly strong social sharing practices in the Creative commons model. As an illustration he showed a chart with those who filed public comments and amicus briefs in the Grokster case, and he pointed out that the annual revenue picture has been much better for the Pro-Grokster corporations than for the Anti-Grokster ones.

The closing presenter was Fred Graver who discussed the Remix America project that would make a database of materials available, which could include works by John Adams, FDR's "four freedoms" speech, and content from the Bill of Rights to form "America's playlist," which would be available for remixing. Although the project is funded by Norman Lear, organizers anticipated that the works created will be multipartisan. Organizationally, they plan both to use Kaltura and to develop a partnership with YouTube. Apparently they have yet to approach the famously litigious estate of the heirs of Martin Luther King who are known for prohibitive licensing fees and pursuit of infringers.

Spreadable Not Sticky

That's right. That's me filming Mimi Ito filming Mark Marino filming Henry Jenkins in the ultimate document of digital media recursiveness.

By virtue of the annual conferences about digital culture that I attend, it seems that I see MIT's Henry Jenkins keynoting several times a year, as I did here and here. But the DIY Video Summit was unusual in that we actually had an extended face-to-face conversation over dinner. Rather than rehearse some of my reservations about his theses in Convergence Culture, while sharing a table with Mark Marino, we three chatted informally about our common tasks as educators. No matter what our differences in theoretical positions or relationships to institutional authority, as a trio we shared many of the same concerns about how best to connect students' social media practices to academic literacy and to negotiate new roles outside of conventional scholarly criticism as bloggers and makers of other forms of digital media.

Jenkins, of course, has been an extraordinarily productive academic blogger, despite a travel schedule that moves him between time zones about as often as I change my shoes. It was nice to get a chance to say in person how I admired how he had made his blog a useful primary source to other researchers, by posting detailed interviews, often with creators who don't otherwise document the rationales for their work. Although it is a solo blog, Jenkins maintains a remarkably dialogic tone. In other words, it's not merely a set of meditations; it's also a series of conversations.

This conference was one in which Jenkins spent a lot of time contextualizing his newer stance as a ”critical utopian,” who has begun to express some skepticism about simplistic equations of participatory culture with Web 2.0. For starters, Jenkins resists such popular terms "meme" and "viral," because he argues that they deny human agency. And rather than talk about the "stickiness" of new media, which suggests that users are merely trapped in the digital form of a roach motel, Jenkins has embraced the term "spreadable" to describe the dissemination of content by members of online communities.

Taking a page from Stephen Duncombe in imagining new forms of activism, Jenkins also described the lifecycle of the famed snowman of the CNN/YouTube debates, with whom Mitt Romney famously said he would refuse to debate. He noted that the "posterchild" snowman borrowed much of its slapstick style from DIY TV original Mr Bill, who ended up serving as a post-Katrina advocate for change on environmental issues. (You can check out Mr. Bill defending the value of the natural history of New Orleans and Louisiana's swamps for yourself.) Thus, what could be called Mr. Bill 2.0, Billiam the Snowman, created by Minnesota brothers Nathan and Greg Hamel, who were fans of the Saturday Night Live original, appropriated Romney's own phrase, "Lighten Up Slightly" to respond to the candidate's jibes.

Like many at the conference, Jenkins also pointed out the limitations of older "digital divide" models that focus solely on access to hardware. He argued that there were three continuing areas of concern when it came to DIY media-making: 1) the "participation gap" that involved social skills and cultural competencies, 2) "majoritarian" structures that constituted user validation in the crudest quantitative terms, and 3) "hater talk" that inhibits participation from the most diverse possible audience. Although he described himself as "agnostic" on the question of whether the platforms for DIY videos should be profit or nonprofit, he did describe the challenge as "to imagine WeTube and not YouTube."

Jenkins and I have had some interesting exchanges recently about applying Lev Manovich's "database aesthetics" to YouTube and the possibility that this aesthetics functions alongside the "vaudeville aesthetics" that Jenkins has described. During the plenary panel, Jenkins pointed out that when Republican presidential contender Rudoph Giuliani objected to fellow candidate Joe Biden’s characterization of his presidential campaign message as “a noun, a verb and 9/11,” anti-Giuliani users of digital tools promptly created a number of mashups that consisted of nothing but selections from the database of Giuliani's references to the event.

For more political database art, you can check out the State of the Union Parsing Tool, this hypertext of The President's Address on Iraq, or a zillion mashups of State of the Union Addresses up to 2007.

Filming without Rose-Colored Glasses

The connection between human rights and DIY video-creation is often taken as a simple case in which democratizing access to the means of media production will magically effect social and political change for the better. Through his involvement with The Hub, a video-sharing site to publicize issues about human rights media that capitalizes on the work of more than a dozen activist groups, Sam Gregory has had to think much more deeply about the consequences of what might seem to be relatively straightforward tactical media efforts that connect victims and activists with the devices to document their experiences.

Gregory began his talk at the DIY Video Summit by looking back fifteen years back to the footage of the beating of Rodney King, which he described as an image immediately recognizable in Guatemala, Nigeria, and Australia (although in the United States its electronic dissemination is forbidden by copyright law). Although Gregory credits a "rich tradition of tactical media" that now spans forty years, he argues that there are many challenges to "smart narrowcasting" that can't be met by what Gregory calls "1990s technophilia" that is limited to simply distributing cameras. He showed a shot of a videographer on the Thai-Burma border, which could easily be an ad for Sony -- as he pointed out -- although Gregory opted not to Photoshop out the company's logo. He contests the ndexicality of image and idea that seeing is believing and suggests that we might now be in “another moment of technophilia,” since a Rodney King type case is actually very anomalous.

He noted that systematic discrimination against indigenous people in Papua Indonesia is “not reducible to the blow of a baton.” He also pointed out that the Rodney King video was actually used as a tool for the legal defense of the police officers who beat him, when it was slowed down in court.

Gregory said that his group aims to promote “video is for a reason not about an issue” and consider how video may be submitted to courts or presented in hearing in direct to decision maker advocacy. To illustrate the power of these materials, he quoted Donald Rumsfeld's expression of alarm that people "are running around with digital cameras and taking these unbelievable photographs and passing them off, against the law, to the media, to our surprise, when they had not even arrived in the Pentagon."

The website for The Hub allows users to "create own profiles and identities" without relying on YouTube, because the culture surrounding this commercial video-sharing site actually facilitates comments that mock and degrade many human rights videos with "racist and xenophobic" language. The Hub also emphasizes "telling transnational stories" and the "power to contextualize and take action." For example, after seeing a video from Egypt of police brutality, visitors to the site are reminded "YOU HAVE WITNESSED THIS NOW GET ACTIVE."

Gregory said that his site encourages both "autonomously produced finished media" and "witness journalism" recorded by mobile devices to address "ideological, philosophical, and action needs" of supporters of human rights initiative. Commercial sites, Gregory asserts, are often where viewers are "content with spectacle" and "vaudevillian performing for the camera." Moreover, commercial sites are much more likely to participate in tracking transmission networks and participating in exploitation and surveillance via IP addresses. Furthermore, Gregory admits that the "pivotal moments of online video" in human rights cases including Abu Ghraib "were shared by the abuser who did it.” Finally, Gregory talked about the need for procedures of "informed consent" and awareness of protective protocols for disclosure that emphasize comprehensive transparency and voluntary participation. To protect the rights of the victim and survivor, Gregory argues that we must think about how remix culture relates to human rights culture. Thus, we may laugh at George Bush when he is remixed but not want to see survivor of torture or a sweatshop worker similarly re-edited for effect.

However, Gregory closed by reminding the audience of the promise of this media model for harnesses not only the "wisdom of crowds" but their "energy" and the fact that sites like The Hub gets beyond "mediated horror," because they are oriented toward action. Certainly, its mobility serves those who may be diasporic refugees or transnational victims of transnational crimes, such as sex trafficking victims. For Gregory the model isn't "DIY" but rather "DIWO" or "Doing It With Others" so that participants are co-producers not consumers. Over on Osocio, the hub for social advertising and non-profit campaigns, to which I contribute the occasional item, the messages crafted in conjunction with the traditional advertising industry may too often feed the consumer culture it critiques.

Update: Sam Gregory has a great review of the session here.

Player Piano

Over on Sivacracy, where I also blog (along with Osocio and Design Your Life), there's been a lot of discussion about why humanities scholars read their papers aloud at conferences, while academics in other disciplines give much more spontaneous presentations. (See part one and part two to get a sense of the exchanges between Siva Vaidhyanathan and Cathy Davidson of HASTAC on the subject.)

Lately, I've seen something even more surreal taking place at academic conferences about digital cultures. Presenters come and just play video in which their argument is presented and supported entirely in edited footage. One of my fellow presenters at AoIR used this technique, and I saw it this weekend at the DIY Summit. Rather than summarize the critique of YouTube as a pedagogical environment that Alexandra Juhasz presents, I would advise you to take her video "tour" and follow her reflections from the inception of a course on YouTube to the playlists with projects, midterms, and finals.



In the Q&A Juhasz emphasized the problem with YouTube's failure to have professional archivists on staff who are indexing visual materials in ways that allow students to access video as well as contextualize it.

Numbers Game

Academic conferences about Internet culture often have representatives from BigChampagne, the source of online metrics that are of interest to the entertainment industry and to academics alike. As Eric Garland pointed out, they have a policy of working with researchers to share resources from their tools for peer-to-peer measurement. I was certainly interested in some of the charts he showed, many of which had political connections -- such as stats on the Yes We Can video created to promote the Barack Obama's presidential bid or on the final Sopranos episode, which was parodied by Hillary Clinton's campaign on YouTube, and the ways that downloading and uploading could be quantified as the debates about digital copyright policies continues. But when he pointed out the fact that Yahoo Live had made it's debut, I'll confess that my attention was diverted while I watched DJs, cans of spam, lava lamps, shirtless men, and Asian women during much of his talk.

YouTube Confessionals

Of course, through his high-profile, much forwarded online videos The Machine is Us/ing Us and A Vision of Students Today, Michael Wesch has brought an enormous amount of public attention to otherwise relatively arcane scholarship about Internet practices. Known as a popularizer, Wesch has certainly had some critics in the academy, because of the broad generalizations stated in these films.

At the DIY Video Summit, Wesch described how he created the Machine video while working on paper about how anthropology was going to be transformed by online environments in the isolated setting of a basement of a house in St. George, Kansas. However, Wesch also decided to make a video using content from the musician Deus in the Ivory Coast. When Wesch disseminated his illustrative video to a few colleagues for feedback, he actually took a screenshot of his YouTube page to show a relatively modest 253 views the next day, which Wesch planned to include in his tenure document, because it seemed to him like a relatively large academic audience at the time. He explained that the life cycle of the video had a lot to do with web services other than YouTube: people blogged it, chose to Digg it, tagged it frequently on del.icio.us, and aggregated it on desktops through pull-media services like Netvibes. Eventually Wesch found his video beating out Superbowl commercials on YouTube.

In contrast, Wesch was discussing a different pedagogical project that was oriented around a smaller audience, The Digital Ethnography of YouTube Project. Like Jeffrey Bardzell, Wesch is well aware of the problems of trying to generalize about the seemingly infinite galaxy of objects of study available on the Internet. Wesch opened his talk by asking how it would be possible to do an ethnography when over seventy million videos are currently on YouTube, thus creating more content over the course of a few years than the entire output of broadcasting during its history. As someone who had done fieldwork in a small New Guinea village with two hundred inhabitants, Wesch confessed to sometimes feeling overwhelmed with the scope of the project for the class, even though he developed a methodology that involved having students camp at the "front door" of the site and collectively evaluate what they saw.

One aspect of his course at Kansas State University, involved a viral video contest among the students, which ultimately included some lowbrow films like “How to Make a YouTube Video Sure to Impress the Ladies” or "Snow Burgler." With over ten thousand hits student Becky Roth's "The Internet Has a Face" may have been one of the most successful of these experiments.

He also had his students turn their webcams on themselves to try to understand the "YouTube Community" or "YouTubia" and the strong love and hatred of people bonding on YouTube who wouldn’t bond in face-to-face situations. Once students had to take part in this particular form of "armchair participant observation," they found themselves in an "instant identity crisis" as soon as the camera was running, which Wesch ascribed to "trying to negotiate too many identities at once" with the complex dynamics at work that Erving Goffman has described. As researchers, there was also an anxiety that they might be engaging in a form of "contrived authenticity." Wesch said, however, that students reached an understanding of "moments of catharsis" and self-reflection in YouTube videos by being in the confessional position of speaking alone in front of a webcam.

Having taught a class that asked students to produce a YouTube video, I thought that Wesch's choice to highlight a particular genre on the site could have been someone limiting in that it didn't involve thinking about interfaces and the processes of editing that are also part of YouTube learning communities. When I taught my Digital Rhetoric course, I set up a low-tech failsafe option for technophobic students, so they could use the webcams in the humanities lab rather than deal with the steep learning curve associated with multimedia. Yet not one student chose this confessional option. Of course, having turned the camera on myself here and here, I certainly sympathized with Wesch's discomfort in seeing himself on camera and would probably agree that I learned something from participating in this practice.

Home Movies

David Buckingham was the first speaker at this weekend's DIY Video Summit about his work on "Camcorder Cultures," which looks at people’s everyday uses of portable video. Unlike some unqualified enthusiasts, Buckingham is often critical of how broadcasters deploy the rhetoric of "user-generated content" and argues that "if users had really seized the means of production" is still an open question, particularly when digital video often serves entrenched interests as a tool for surveillance or potentially perpetuating a "society of the simulacrum" that only serves up mediated representations to its citizens. However, Buckingham also asserts that the British government has become relatively progressive about fostering media literacy rather than merely policing behavior and points to the efforts of OFCOM to promote citizen empowerment.

Much of Buckingham's talk was devoted to explaining his theoretical orientations and his interests in domestic photography and movie-making, vernacular creativity, and learning in communities of practice. Scholars on his list of influences included James Moran, Patricia Zimmerman, Richard Chalfen, Keith Negus, Mike Pickering, Joe Spence, Annette Kuhn, Charles Leadbeater, Robert Stebbins, Howard Becker, Jean Burgess, Etienne Wenger, Paul Willis, Lucy Green, Jon Dovey, and -- of course -- Pierre Bourdieu

He argued that academics too often focus on "cool video" rather than seriously think about how people come to see themselves as media-makers and write about machinima, remixes, or activist video rather than consider how family rituals and celebrations are documented in the "home mode." (Buckingham did admit to having done research on hipster topics like skateboarder movies and the associated visual self-representations crucial to learning and on pornography.) Along with hours and hours of "painfully boring footage" and "just farting around," his group has made some interesting findings about video literacy practices among the ethically and socio-economically diverse group of London households that were given cameras by his research team.