YouTube 2012

Yesterday I began my fourth incarnation of Learning From YouTube. Welcome class of 2012! Since I began the project in 2007, there are quite a few differences for both YouTube and my class about/on it. While I named some of those changes here when YouTube turned 5, I’ll enumerate some new changes for our fresh beginning.

• Most critically, there is now a large and worthy body of YouTube studies, both scholarly and journalistic (including my own “video-book“), that my students and I must account for. When we began, we were writing the stuff, but now we must play the role of dutiful learners. This quick consolidation of expertise runs against the common understanding of the Internet (and its studies) as a flat playing field where all users and uses are equal.

• When I began, a course about YouTube was thought to be a joke.

• Today, there are lost of college classes and other esteemed cultural institutions devoted to thinking about social networking and new media. The mainstream media, scholars, and culture at large takes YouTube pretty seriously.
• When I began the class, YouTube was already ascending but not ubiquitous.
• Everything we thought was hot on YouTube in 2007 has been forgotten.

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• YouTube’s economic and architectural and design structures have made superficial changes.
• Tastemakers now watch YouTube for us, and get us through its sea of crap to the “good” stuff.
• There is more quality programming on YouTube from both corporate culture and everyday users

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And the rest of the current state of YouTube will be for us to determine. Look for findings here and elsewhere as we commence our studies.

Why I Won’t See Devil Inside: Because It’s Probably Dumb…

I have some passing interest in horror (I teach a class on it), I am supposed to be an “expert” on fake documentaries, and my recent concern is user-made video. Thus, I feel some professional obligation to see (and then write about) films in the fake register that are either big-grossing or viral-wonders (i.e. Paranormal Activity, Catfish, I’m Still Here, Taking Woodstock, Exit Through the Gift Shop, or “the lesbian blogger Amina“), just to stay current. But I won’t go to see Devil Inside at a movie theater, and even when I catch it streaming on Netflix, I’ll still be sorry.

Why? Well first of all, it’s reputed to be a very bad movie, and given that even the movies that the general audience tends to like leave me underwhelmed, the crowd’s “F” rating is a strong enough detraction. But more importantly, for me, once you choose to go into self-reflexive mode, you need to be smart as well as crafty. This is the piece (intelligence, commentary, critique) that is missing in our culture’s current obsession with parody. It’s easy enough to fake style: every day users do this as a YouTube pre-req.

But to attach that falsification of an artistic norm to an idea, any idea, about that norm, that culture, the truth, history identity, movies, technology: now there’s the rub. However, since I believe that disbelief attached to mean-spirited mockery is itself the cultural norm and form then perhaps there’s another way to see this. Devil Inside is not a fake of anything, it is the thing itself, which means it is not self-reflexive, which means it can be dumb, but even so, I don’t need to see it, given how swamped I am anyway, by all the other dumb things that come my way given my now-generic interest in fakes (see my personal rub above).

I’m (Just Not) Political: Pariah

To begin, I think Pariah is terrific. Dee Rees is a very talented writer and director whose grasp of her craft is exceptional for a young artist. She has made a moving character study in the melodramatic form where her vivid style is in service of character development and depth.

I believe that Pariah is the second film by and about African American lesbians to have a theatrical release. The first was Cheryl Dunye’s Watermelon Woman, which I produced in 1995 (Dunye‘s The Owls which I produced in 2011, has just started streaming on Netflix but did not have theatrical).

Now that there’s two, we can look to where black lesbian cinema has arrived fifteen years later. WMW occurs in the material world, and the world of film. It is all about ideological context: black lesbian feminist theory, politics, institutions, and movies. It is highly self-referential to ideas about representation and to expressions of lesbian, feminist and queer community and history. In this regard, it is much like many of its brother films of the “New Queer Cinema” (Poison, Swoon, The Living End, Young Soul Rebels). Meanwhile, Pariah is deeply even purely personal. Shot almost entirely in exquisite and often extreme close-ups, the surrounding world becomes barely visible, so much so that Pariah is the rare New York City film where the mean streets don’t become a character (take for example, those of Dees’ fellow NYUers Spike Lee and Martin Scorcese). In fact, Alike’s pursuit of freedom eventually leads her to leave New York, at the film’s end en route to California (and college) where the promise of intellectual (and political?) community beckons. For Alike, New York is only and always home: melodrama’s confining world of mother, family, and out-of-touch dogme. While Dees begins her film with a quotation from Audre Lorde, this is the only glimmer of several generations of black, feminist, lesbian history and culture that touches the film or her film’s lead. Even Alike’s inspiring poetry teacher inspires the young woman’s growth by demanding that her search be more internal: into her deepest, most honest, self and feelings. But like any (male) hero, Alike discovers from her journey that she’s ready for the road. Interestingly then, the WMW seems to envision the quest that Alike just might be lucky enough to go on at her film’s happy ending. In WMW, Cheryl spends her film’s journey traveling a uniquely black and lavender road (from “Sistah Sound” in Philly, to the “CLIT lesbian archives” in NY, to the private collections of a black film buff, and the uptight mansion of a white female early film director’s homophobic sister) so as to learn from a variety of her black/queer/female mentors, each wise in some of the history(ies) she needs to learn for an internal growth that promises to happen when her film ends: “I am a black lesbian filmmaker and I have a lot to say.”

Fifteen years later, Dees gets to begin from the very proud, private, political place that Dunye claims at her first film’s end, and that is the inspiring and exciting (if enragingly slow) circle of (black lesbian) legacy and sisterhood: from political to personal to political again. While other film traditions—and their fans, scholars, and makers—get larger bodies of work upon which to build sensibilities, trends, and movements, these artists must do so in an intimate, personal dialogue. And given its intimacy and clarity, maybe that’s not all bad. Here, a scene from The Owls (again including Audre Lorde) seems an apt conclusion. Carol (played by Cheryl Dunye) is having a conversation with Skye (Skyler Cooper). “Let me tell you about my generation and being happy. We had Audre Lorde.” “Who’s that?” “You don’t know who Audre Lorde is! She said: ‘I’m a black, lesbian, mother, poet, warrior out in the world doing my work. Are you doing yours?’” “What does that mean?” “It means are you out, fighting, working for justice?!” Skye says: “I’m just not political.” But Dees is: out in the world that is, doing her work in just the way that her generation will, in conversation with ours, by making powerful personal films.

Stories of Digital Storytelling

My graduate Cultural Studies class, Visual Research Methods, has my students performing scholarship about visual culture, using visual methods (alongside or supplanting traditional scholarly writing about the visual), and visual formats. The final section of the course is about digital storytelling, and the assignment is to consider this new phenomenon within and through the sphere itself. The course yielded some first rate scholarship, listed here, on the digital storytelling of:

• Chinese skateboard culture: “How Digital Storytelling Contributes to Chinese Skateboarding Culture“
• a family who lives in Hysperia, CA: “Digital Storytelling“
• pro-am YouTubers: “From YouTube Amateur to Pro-Am“
• enviornmentalist bloggers writing on experiments in green living: “Thoreau 2.0″ Sharing the Environmentalist Experiment Online“
• a formerly incarcerated female family member: “TRAPPED: Digital Storytelling“
• a radicalized baseball: “A Different Vision of Baseball“
• the Occupy movement: “Digital Storytelling a Trojan Horse for Social Movements?”
• fans of the Getty Museum: “Digital Storytelling of the Visitors of the Getty Villa“
• teaching digital storytelling

Enjoy!

Social Movements, Social Justice, Social Networks

I was recently interviewed for our college radio station, KPCC’s show “UpRoot: A Public Affairs Show.” The other interviews are with student activists and activist professors.

Context is Politics: Reflections on FOL 2

The second offering of my Online Feminist Spaces class ended this Monday. In the meantime, I’m in the early stages of building the website that hopes to address concerns and themes raised by the course(s) and through my presentations about it on the road. As I’ve said before, the Pitzer version of the class found the majority of students studying “in-between spaces” online where a feminist/queer identity was central to the mission of the site, but a a corporate, mainstream, or satiric sensibility worked to preclude a more political, not to mention radical understanding of feminism in the site’s structure, experience and purpose. Our field trip to Occupy LA was also a defining experience for this class, and from these two positions—in-between and on-the-edge—comes the idea in the title: Context is Political. This adage signifies our growing idea that a feminist action, idea, goal, or identity only becomes political in context: i.e. in a community, an embrasive or democratic structure, an opposition space, a home, online.

A few related points are key:

• feminism (and queerness) can not be disentangled from anti-racism. While many “in-between” sites comfortably ascribe to a “feminist” politics, their blind eye to, inattention concerning, or fear of a linked race-based analysis unmakes their claims to a progressive politics.
• feminism can not be disentangled from politics. A passive “feminist” orientation, or way-of-being, or sensibility that is not connected to action unmakes claims to progressive politics.
• feminism can not be disentangled from democracy, however democratic spaces are not necessarily feminist or anti-racist. In fact, democratic spaces are often anti-feminist and racist.
• feminism needs to be disentangled from the corporate.
• feminism must be entangled with community and conversation. The Internet’s common culture of commenting, where each person democratically speaks her mind without entangling her thoughts with those of others that come after or before, or in a continuing and building dialogue, does not lead to political possibility (this does not even begin to describe “YouTube commenting” culture: that kind based on insults, inanity, and innuendo).
• feminism happens best in real time and real space, which includes temporally and spatially coherent and shared digital experiences that are linked to warranted bodies.

U of GA’s Digitelling

I am happy to network Digitelling, as requested:

“My name is Christie Doss, and I am a student at the University of Georgia’s Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication. I am writing to tell you abou —-and generate interest in— a student-driven research project focused on “Digital Storytelling.” We have interviewed leading scholars (for example, Henry Jenkins, Lisa Nakamura and Ian Bogost) and developed original research on the subject. I would greatly appreciate it if you could post this link (www.digitalstorytelling.grady.uga.edu) on your personal/professional website– and if you have the time and interest, to consider it as a topic for your blog, Twitter feed, or Facebook page.”

Is Occupy LA a Feminist Space?

Yes … ish?

Here, my students and I, from Feminist Online Spaces, create a real-space circle at Occupy LA, after some initial trepidation, but with nothing resulting other than friendly/bemused/flirty/crazy conversation from fellow Occupiers.

Why the trepidation? As we took stock of the space deciding upon our action beforehand, the presence of a group of young, collegiate-looking women brought many unanticipated (and unwanted) comments about their looks, their femaleness, and their presence in the place. While none of the comments were threatening, per se, they did function, as is typical in such (sexist) situations, to not to make my students feel truly welcome—”welcome lovely ladies!”—but to make them feel female in a place that was overtly signalling itself as male and interested. While it is impossible to make generalizations about everyone who is occupying LA, my experience after three visits is that this group is predominantly young and male, mixed-race, and alternatively from scenes that look like street-kids/anarchists/homeless/students/politicos/hippies. My students did not look much like them, and were told so, again and again, in a way that alternated between friendly, flirtatious, and salacious.

Now, I have been to many, many protests, big and small, public and private, since I was myself a college student, and I must attest that during this particular action (we made a small circle in the public space and held signs about feminism, patriarchy, and our bodies) I felt the least a part of the movement I was engaged with, and the most a (welcome) spectacle, as I ever have. Usually, this situation is in reverse: I feel objectification, difference, judgement from the passers-by not the protesters. However, given the nature of the space of OLA, one demonstrates to the community and not the society at large (unless the media intervenes). My feeling was that the OLA community was supportive, and even interested, but there was little shared vocabulary by which our unique Occupy claims (Occupy Patriarchy) and our (young) female occupying bodies were readily legible within the already understood discourse and norms of the (LA) movement.

Let me put it another way. I’ve never been at a protest where being a college student (or professor) makes you stand out (or, frankly, being a feminist). I have protested against or for Apartheid, abortion, censorship, several wars, AIDS, homophobia, racism, civil rights, fraternities, violence against women, nukes, and peace. In every one of these settings, an organized, vocal, and central presence of feminists and a feminist critique has anchored my experience, and allowed for my voice, presence, and feminist-inflected demands to feel relatively acceptable or accepted within the protest and protestors. This is not to say that there hasn’t been internal difference or conflict (say, the role of feminists and women within AIDS organizing, for instance), but instead to suggest that within that intra-movement struggle, a strong feminist analysis became understood, by those who came to the movement with other political orientations, as fundamental to the movement. Given that one of the strengths of the Occupy movement is that it has no fundamental point of view, but allows for anyone to use the space to make their own demands, this begs the question of whether a baseline of movement norms will ultimately be necessary for all of us in the 99% to feel welcome. I am aware of similar writing from the point of view of people of color and queers.

In my class, we have spoken about whether online spaces that allow for equal access to conversation but which then produce hostile/sexist/unthoughtful dialogues are “feminist,” and we have decided that democratic access is a necessary first step for feminist spaces, but then, so too, is feminist education, structure, and power-sharing.  I am aware that there is a Woman’s Group within OLA, and I look forward to how they will move their complex community in these directions.

Scholar/Performers and Academic “Talks”

My Fall Road Show has been a fruitful opportunity to play out, in person, many of the issues of concern for my Online Feminist Spaces project: namely my interest in performing and interrogating in form the unique and mutually-influencing strengths of on/off line community and interaction. For instance, I have been quite interested in the intentional deployment of feeling in an (academic) room as one critical part of this live, human (or feminist) interaction that is almost impossible to replicate online. However, given that academic talks are supposed to be devoid of feeling or even performativity (the norm is more like a human-fronted power-point or journal article), simply by being present and also interactive and emotional, I change the rules of engagement towards feminism’s commitments to the personal, communal, and emotional, as well as the intellectual. As any good professor knows, to move the room in some sort of orchestrated way across ideas and through communally experienced feelings is one fine path towards education and community building. Now, let’s imagine the same things in reverse.

Say, you don’t go to the scholarly conference (because it’s too expensive, or you want to make a more radical intervention) and you perform your presence instead online? What does that gesture tell us about the possibilities, strengths, and norms of the scholarly exchange of ideas, in rooms, between people? Wendy Hsu (who I met in person at Oxy last week) did just this last Friday at the annual meetings of the Society of Ethnomusicologists. I also pulled off something of the same at the Digital Media and Learning Conference in 2010. The point of such efforts is not a lazy relay of an old form into a new one (slapping a book written on paper on to the internet, recording a talk that is twenty minutes and dumping it onto YouTube, although both of these efforts allow for greater access and the killing of far fewer trees) but rather the transformation of forms (and the media that hold them) in relation to scholarly findings about space, liveness, and new media. Neither strictly a “video essay” (a form I teach in my Visual Research Methods course) nor a scholarly conference talk, efforts like Hsu’s at creative, performative, reflexive, politicized public scholarship about and in new media ask us to consider via form the “responsibilities, rights, visibility and consequence” of our scholarly labor while claiming (at least for Hsu) spaces outside of “Orientalism and racial melancholia” by engaging, aligning, and recording affect and absence, performance and presence.

Digital Storytelling: Where the Experts

I teach a course, Visual Research Methods, for Cultural Studies at the Claremont Graduate University where I push graduate students who have made a career of paper-writing to express their intellectual work about visual culture, visually. Even as the course provocatively pushes them as individuals out of their comfort zones of expression and audience, it also begs larger questions about field formation, training, authority, the use, ethics and scale of academic work, and its normative vernaculars, media, and modalities. While they start closer to home with video essays, then moving farther afield through documentary and ethnographic media, they end someplace new again: right smack here, in the Internet, asked to think about and through “digital storytelling.”

While you might imagine that a great deal of the writing on the Internet might be considered just such a text, there is actually a sort of academic/non-profit stranglehold on the what this terms means: “A short, first person video-narrative created by combining recorded voice, still and moving images, and music or other sounds” as enabled by the standard workshops given to local citizens at the Center for Digital Storytelling in Berkeley, CA, and its many official and kindred sites around the world, institutions where trained experts facilitate the voices of the people. The work that comes out of these centers follows a rather predictable model for both form and content—private often painful or sensational stories, illustrated with personal images and moving scores—while also attaining a level of quality and attention that a good deal of the “bad video” of the Internet lacks. These other “digital stories” sit in some precarious and complex relation with the unruly, undisciplined, and often proto-literate projects of citizens who tell their stories outside of institutional sanction, training, or norms: the blogs, tweats, videos, and tumblrs of web 2.0.

For my students (and for me), this begs the role of the (visual/academic) expert in the sea of the digital: to speak here ourselves in new voices and vernaculars and to different audiences, to train the peeps to be more literate, to look at the work of day to day users and better understand it. This post serves as an invitation for my students currently enrolled in the course to blog about their initial stake in and take about digital storytelling (you’ll find their ideas in the comments here over the next few days). But we’d love to hear from other readers as well: about my opening remarks, or my students’ thoughts relayed on their own blogs (another visual research method for the course). In our readings for this week from Digital Storytelling, Meditized Stories, Knut Lundby introduces his anthology by raising these academic understandings of digital storytelling: as small scale stories that give a voice to ordinary people through self-representation using digital technology; as multi-modal transformations that remix culture to challenge institutions through personal narratives and a performance of authenticity. It seems worth noting that many of these ideas about scale, institutional challenge, multi-modality, authority, and performance are equally critical to understanding scholars moves into a digital (research) voice (note my first paragraph), so I invite some introspection and self-reflexivity (as have many past students in the course) about “digital storytelling” as well: