Bows and Flows: Composing your Own

Flow’s a big word these days. But people are using it differently:

“Most media, like television, used to be a kind of flow. You’d sit down, you’d turn it on and you’d watch. That reason advertising is completely broken is that the flow doesn’t exist anymore. There’s no prime time. There’s no such thing as must-see TV. Everyone’s composing their own flow. And once you start becoming the composer of your own flow, you can’t go back.” Lars Bastholm, Multi-screen Madman

Then there’s Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi who uses the term to describe “What makes a life worth living?” A “flow like” feeling of pleasure and lasting satisfaction found in certain activities.

Finally, my students and I have come to name a new genre of YouTube videos “flow videos” in that they attempt to represent this feeling from the point of view of the individual (and community) who feels it. Not a fan vid because it is user produced, but also user experienced and user generated, and almost always outside-the-corporate, and not the flow of dominant media which washes over you while you numbly waste time and people secretly control your mind and viewing habits, this YouTube genre marks the kinetic joy of people-made fun. While we might all be familiar with the ubiquitous skateboard version of this form of representation, we were intrigued to find YouTube celebrations of less known sites for flow:

YouTube War: Jennifer Terry on Viral Video

Yesterday I got to attend a great talk by Irvine Women’s Studies prof Jennifer Terry. She’s been working on soldier-produced viral videos about Iraq, and how they reconfigure the representation, affect, and meanings of war. She suggests that these shockingly decontextualized, non-narrative clips using “extreme verite” enhance morale by representing the war through the first person shooter’s logic of recreation and winning. I found useful (if frightening) her description of the kinetic nature of the images created through the DOD’s “full-spectrum warrior plan,” where the body of the soldier becomes a “data-collecting object” through helmet cams and other devices. She explains that a terrifying oblivion of affect (what my students and I are calling “FLOW videos”–more on this later) is created through this “jolting” vision.

Then, I realized that my LFYT students really are contributing to primary YouTube research, when I shared some of the conversations we had had when one of them shared some soldier’s home movies as part of our class section on this genre.

Our class conversation complements Terry’s analysis by looking at these images through the history and theory of the home movie (as opposed to other “reality” based genres). Through this lens, we were forced to consider how contemporary media culture has begun to re-write the rules of amateur representations of the intimate, in that home movies have been typically theorized as repressing, hiding, or denying the violence under the surface of the happy family and stable society. In this new genre of war (home) videos, we see soldiers representing the sordid, violent, and illicit behavior that has hither-to been the unrepresentable underside of war. As Terry emphasized, YouTube has created a culture of “remote intimacy” where such “personal expression moves into the public sphere.” Then, audience member Anniko Imre added that new media tends to “elevate the trivial while trivializing what’s important.” The language of home video is being rethought and re-purposed to personalize the monumental, trivialize the violent, and expose the worst…and we’re all invited to look.

After E-learn: Small is small

A few thoughts on the first day of the E-learn conference (all I got to attend). Given my short stay in Vegas, I decided to attend the talks of the invited speakers, and this was an excellent choice. All three were really fine public speakers, and each left me with plenty of e-food for thought.

Richard Baraniuk spoke about open access educational materials, and in particular connexions, his successful “place to view and share educational material made of small knowledge chunks called modules that can be organized as courses, books, reports, etc.” He believes education should follow the lead of music, and allow for rich user customization and personalization (creating, ripping, mixing, and burning) to engender creativity, access, and participation in learning. He made me realize how the YouTube class was my attempt to force the ethos and practices of open access education into a corporate site that easily resists and regulates our attempts. We all could use an educational video platform, and soon!

Elliot Soloway, also a fine and rambunctious speaker, while gently pitching his company dedicated to developing mobile learning environments for K-12, explained how educators have been often fooled by complex views (and uses) of technology mixed with simple views of the social situations of teaching (and living), while clearly the reverse is more apt. While he convinced me that children will be excited and playful with tiny and mobile hand-held learning devices, this continued to raise my concerns about the loss of the long-form. While he and I share the belief that learning should be fun, we also recognize the joy of investigating and experiencing in-depth, and must continue to include these possibilities in (and out) of the technologies we use, develop, and support.

Continuing the celebration of the small, Ken Carroll, founder of Chinesepod which teaches language in 10-minute chunks to lots and lots of people all over the world (based upon the “digital learning object” which actually nicely links the commitments of all three speakers), explained how “small is beautiful” in that “small gives users more control.” He’s right. And we’ll all need to decide, as we live through it, to what gains and what losses. As Carroll reiterated, “the medium is the message” and it is critical that we design each medium to maximize its best qualities while understanding its limitations. We probably won’t use mobile phones to read or write novels or feature films. But as new technologies, and the entrepreneurs, users, and educators who meet there, begin to form defacto standards (like the 2-minute YouTube video; or 7 second one, below), we may be gaining fun (and participation) while giving up the long, deep, and complex. A great loss:

Watching the Detectives: The Future of Writing

This blog must be brief, mostly because I’m over-committed to other forms of writing, but I do want to make a few comments about the terrific conference I got to attend last week at Irvine, The Future of Writing, and how it impacted me. As “inter-disciplinary” as my work is, it is always shocking to be reminded of the neat little silos in which we inevitably operate. At this conference, as is perhaps even more true for the one I’m attending next week, E-learn, I found myself in fruitful dialogue with scholars and teachers of rhetoric, writing, and education as well as the technologists who support, code and theorize the moving of our diverse practices and interests into the digital. It reminded me how much of my typical conference experience is about “content” (i.e. documentary or youtube videos) rather than about “process” (teaching, writing, making–whatever the content). As always, I learned a lot from fellow panelist, Liz Losh, who is carefully theorizing from and documenting her own experiments with teaching digital writing at Digital Rhetoric.

Most dramatically, many of we singing detectives seemed to agree that all these gizmos that we’re enthusiastically adding to our repertoire don’t actually seem to be improving writing, or reading, or teaching. Professor of Rhetoric and Writing, Lester Faigley,  in his talk “Considering the Possibility of Writing 2.0,” concluded that blogging has certainly expanded the number of writers and their many pages, but has not necessarily made this writing any better. Furthermore, the sheer number of words at our disposal has turned us all into skimmers and summarizers, even when the task at hand (writing a letter of evaluation for tenure, for instance) demands better. Before this, at lunch, I was chatting with Mark Marino, who teaches writing at USC and its interfaces with new media, electronic literature, and visual culture. Remember, we’re the people out there playing with this stuff. And he too lamented that old-fashioned paper and pencil writing instruction might lead to just as good writing as all the stuff he was inventing with his students through the nifty spy-gear he introduced to his students.

I left feeling like we needn’t go back, but we also need to be better at labelling how these tools move us forward, what they’re good at enhancing, and when we might want to shelve them.

On Video Writing

This is the transcript (and written form) of a “talk” I will present at the Future of Writing Conference at UC Irvine, on Friday. It begins with the video above (you need to watch it, just a minute, to begin), and links to videos across its duration. You can also watch in through my playlist on YouTube.

My gimmick, to teach the course both about and also on YouTube allowed for a brief viral moment last Fall, itself a great lesson in the workings of popularity, simplicity, and humor within on-line social networking and its many media convergences.

Needless to say our aims for the course have always been serious. In Learning from YouTube, I am interested in participating with my students in primary research about the forms and functions of this particular poster-child for web 2.0. By together engaging the site against YouTube’s primary aims of entertainment, we learn about the limits of its corporate architecture, and our own needs as new media makers and learners.

For the class, students are required to do all their coursework as either YouTube videos or comments. In the process, they are remaking academic writing for the digital classroom. In my talk today, I will introduce eight new forms of academic video writing: Public Writing, Isolated Writing, Reflexive Writing, Visual, Amateur and Control Writing, and Convergence and Censored Writing. I am not suggesting that each of these stylistics are not also used within traditional written expression, but rather, that they are modified, hybridized, and amplified in on-line academic video writing in ways that serve to demonstrate the current state of writing within web 2.0.
I will begin by naming some common forms and approaches that appear across the eight academic video writing forms that will be the focus of this talk. I have found there are three common structures for video writing: one, word-reliant (reading or writing a traditional paper on to video. Notably, this form allows for the most complex meanings and the least interesting videos). Next, probably most common, and arguably most successful for our purposes, is the illustrated summary, composed through the bullet pointing of more detailed ideas which are cut to images of YouTube as evidence. Finally, perhaps my favorite, and certainly the most creative, is the YouTube hack, where academic content is wedged into a popular YouTube vernacular form. Besides these common formats I hope you will observe the ubiquitous use of two, often understood as postmodern, devices of tone and structure—humor (most often being cynical, sarcastic, or parodic in form) and self-reflexivity. Finally, sometimes my students will pull the power play of sincerity, which, in ways YouTube, creates productive tension with the site’s expected cynacism and humor. As you may have already deduced from my academic video writing here, detailed rhetorical analysis, the bell weather of productive scholarly expression, is not the most powerful of tactics for this venue. I would characterize my own production, as word-reliant, amateurish, public, reflexive, and also an example of control and convergence video writing. I hope that by talk’s end, my own terms, tactics and practices will be clarified.

1. PUBLIC WRITING: The writing classroom ideally depends upon an intimate and “safe” gathering of carefully selected students to create a communal pedagogy. They write for the professor, and sometimes to each other, but the general public is neither their audience nor critic. Privacy and mutuality encourage the development of voice. In a YouTube classroom, where anyone and everyone can see and participate, such tried and true pedagogic structures shift. While access grows, the disciplining structures in place in a closed classroom or private paper can not be relied upon.
2. ISOLATED WRITING: Much YouTube writing, academic or not, while publicly presented, is produced in and about isolation, and in the hopes of finding community. This form of writing mirrors YouTube’s raison d’etre—wasting time—and so often results in meaningless, silly, or narcissistic ruminations on self. However, its reverse is the humble stab at sincere communication, banking upon what I call “NicheTube’s” guarantee that no one will actually find, see, or hear you in the uncharted and unruly sea of similarly unheard attempts at communication and self-expression.
3. REFLEXIVE WRITING makes YouTube its content and form, creating a dizzying hall of media mirrors where “the real” dissolves, a necessary but unmissed casualty to a more rich, and endlessly self-referential and self-fulfilling life on-line.
4. Written expression is closed down on YouTube. Its 500 character limit, and sandlot culture, produces a dumbing-down for the word nearly impossible to remedy. So, VISUAL WRITING reigns. In this highly entertaining form, meaning is lost to feeling that is buttressed by the sound of music and cut to the speed of final cut pro. Both spectacle and humor reliant, this is also the terrain of the expert (dependent upon corporate or popular media even if modified by “amateurs”). It is hard to use for academic video writing, but students try, usually through opposition.
5. AMATEUR WRITING is word reliant. It is either the stuff of real people talking into their low-end cameras about their private pleasure or pain, or regular people demonstrating their exceptional or laughable skills. It can be popular if it seems sincere, or if a spectacle of humiliation or extreme talent is at its core.
6. CONTROL WRITING works against the chaotic, undisciplined culture of YouTube and attempts to force structure, and the possibility for building complexity, onto its pages. The significance of discipline for academic work proves the rule. Without it, ideas stay vague and dispersed, there is no system for evaluation, and you can’t find things or build upon them. On YouTube it comes across as somewhat School Marmish, yes?
7. CENSORED WRITING is definitive of YouTube (usually heralded as a democratic platform) where users routinely flag content, servicing the corporation, whenever it strays from the comfortable confines of the hegemonic. To get to this video, “Blacks on YouTube final” you need to be of right age, as it is has been flagged for inappropriate (critical?) content. Blacks on YouTube  Note: The video that secured the most hits in our video writing contest, “Nailin’ Palin” (the ripped first minute of the Hustler hit), an example of COPYRIGHT WRITING can not be included in this tour because it was taken down.
8. CONVERGENCE WRITING: As Henry Jenkins points out, new media allows for writing that gains its impact by moving across platforms and building upon the power of ready-made media already encrusted with meaning (and ownership). So easy, even children can join the fun.

Resolutions 3: Thinking Context, Place, and Gender

I had the pleasure of attending 2/3 days of this impressively large and diverse symposium organized by my friends and colleagues, Ming-Yuen Ma and Carol Stakenas from LACE. This post is not a review, but rather an attempt to crystalize connections between some of the work and conversation that I found most provocative. After this word, I couldn’t help but begin where the conference did, with the work of Wafaa Bilal who has created several interactive media projects based upon a shared logic and structure of first-person shooter games and our current war in Iraq.

Waafa’s work inspired fruitful dialogue at the symposium about the significance of context and other authorial controls within the field of contemporary video art or video art within a new media environment, (here meaning video practices that are networked, mobile, and viewable across platforms rather than stand-alone in a museum or monitor). Whereas some “old-school” video artists might have been done when they crafted the discrete piece, new media conditions have forced focused artistry around extra-textual questions–about building (and managing) audience and supporting information, as well as systems of interaction and engagement–that might have only once been on the map of “activist” videomakers. Waafa explained that he made “dynamic” not “didactic” work that created a new public forum, mirroring life, where critical questions could be played out and with. While many of us were concerned that this allowed participants to primarily publicly restage their already strongly held positions, desires, and commitments Waafa seemed satisfied with this outcome (that, for instance, a large portion of the players on his piece, Shoot an Iraqi, came to it–and him–as paint ball enthusiasts rather than through an engagement with  war, zenophobia, or racism).

I continued to think about these questions contextual in relation to seeing Natalie Bookchin’s Trip (2008), a 63 minute video installation composed of moving landscapes shot from cars, often with music accompanying, and culled from Youtube. Bookchin told us that after many years of highly successful tactical media work with the groups @rtMark and Yes Men, she’s needed to move things OFF of mainstream media platforms, to restage them in the real world, where there is less noise, and in counter-distinction to Waafa’s work, more room for authorial and spectatorial structure (and perhaps contemplation and even dialogue). Later, we also spoke together about the waning power of satire (a staple for tactical media) as it becomes the dominant tonality, and my recent concern (expressed in posts below) that YouTube media, specifically, has to strive to say what it means, rather than relying on smug reference and repetitive asides.

Finally, along this vein of context, place and tone, I watched a productive encounter between video artists Maria Diaz and Alex Villar.

Both artists videotape the placement of their own bodies into difficult spaces. However, where Alex’s are the hidden in-betweens of generic offices and city spaces, where he uncomfortably but artfully wedges his body, Maria’s are entirely personal and local sites: a field in Guatemala where she walks and carries her pre-adolescent daughter, a central town square where she produces poetry for passers-by. The project of inserting oneself tactically into the ubiquitous flow of daily media military corporate life is quite distinct from the intervention (Jennifer Doyle’s term) of a specific body, with an overt position, into a particular place.

It seems critical, but also a little difficult, for me to note how highly gendered these divergent (but related) practices played out for me at the symposium: women artists insisting upon the specificity of their bodies and beliefs (ho hum), and male ones making larger more open-ended claims about the gendered and raced but mediated body (we’ve been here before!). Men using humor, women getting serious. I am the first to acknowledge that none of these strategies are in and of themselves gendered, but I will also affirm that for the three days of Resolutions3 they played out for me, fruitfully, in these terms.

DIY Dilemmas

I went to an inspiring talk by Ian Mackaye, of long-time punk and more recent Fugazi fame. Since the 1980s he’s quite successfully run an underground record label, played in bands, living his life by his own private ethics as an artist on the outside and in opposition to corporate, media, military culture.

I’m wasn’t there as a fan, although I understand why people would be, I attended because I thought he might be able to help me with my concern about the current ubiquitous use of the term “DIY”—one which I credit to punk, rightly or wrongly—towards any-old user-produced digital stuff: fan vids, remixes of The Hills, odes to Naruto or Apple. I asked him if the term “DIY” necessarily included a critique, a counter-cultural attitude, an anti-corporate agenda, of it it really just meant “stuff people make.” He answered that if people make stuff off the expressway of dominant, corporate culture, and they instead choose to wend their way around the small slow back roads of craft (the transportation metaphors are his), outside the rules and goals of the market, that this “was political,” whether the maker had a political position or not, whether the user celebrated corporate culture, or no.

I had to stop and look at my dogmatic position once again. These guys are challenging to me, given how they’re much more inclusive and open to the real likes and activities of regular people than I seem to be able. However, Mackaye himself spoke about finding himself, finally, as a lonely teenager (who would found the band Minor Threat at like 14) in punk because there, for the first time, he was in a room with the freaks, and outsiders, and political people, and artists who knew that they would not be satisfied or recognized or fully realized within the stuff and ways of the slick, fast, highway to nowhere (or to more vapid stuff) of dominant culture. Let’s face it, I asked the expert, he’s lived a real DIY life (although, in many ways I have, too. All my video, and academic work, really, falls outside corporate mechanisms of production and reception) and he’s ready to accept it all.

But then, I read Tomas Guiterrez Alea, for my Media Praxis class and he also speaks to me around questions DIY: “When I refer to ‘contemplative’ spectators, I mean ones who do not move beyond the passive-contemplative level; inasmuch as ‘active’ spectators, taking the moment of live contemplation as their point of departure, would be those who generate a process of critically understanding reality (including, of course, the show itself) and consequently, a practical, transforming action.”

I want to find, celebrate, and believe in the possibilities of a critical DIY culture that activates us to a process of understanding reality from whence we are then compelled to practically, actively transform. What might the less-than-critical DIY culture need to move from contemplation to activation? Why can’t more of us be like Ian Mackaye?

Circling Jenkins 2: Boobs and Bytes

In the same Learning from YouTube class where two students presented their fake documentary about convergence culture and The Hills (see video, True Life: I’m addicited to ‘The Hills’ on-line forums, embedded on the previous post below, Pushing Around Henry Jenkins), two other groups presented on political convergence culture. They made videos about their research on regular people using YouTube to enhance their participation in our current election.

I lead with the circle for two reasons: first, while the Hills project ridicules girls for wasting time engaged in close-readings of bad television, the politics projects celebrate YouTubers for doing the same. Can you have it both ways and no way at once (going round and round and round in the circle game…)?

The second round reference is to the breasts that feature prominently (if unintentionally) and centrally within all the videos featured in this intelligent, if un-critical compendium of the formats used for YouTube political convergence culture:

As we build collective intelligence about this election (and otherwise), should we be satisfied with the sexism and satire that undergirds much YouTube discourse? Is a reliance upon, and use of (even if sarcastically) often stupid popular culture even understandable as intelligence? My students suggest that moving (circling) bytes of media from one platform to another (convergence), raising its exposure and hits, is a, no the form of contemporary political participation. Given, they say, that politics is merely cynical spin, and thus there is no distinction between media about the world and the world itself, then watching and passing on videos, and sometimes commenting on them, is activism.

No more circling, I will be direct in my criticism: while any participation, and passion, and action is better than none, we must be bold enough to name ideals for the best of people’s culture (not just getting stuck in the fact of it), and retro enough to state that there remains a world outside the media hall-of-mirrors. Which is to say that participatory culture can benefit from both teachers and theorists (who pass along ideas and structures to allow for deeper engagements with culture) and reality (where the criticisms of real people leave the looking glass and alter  lived experience). As I lectured my students yesterday: there is a war, and a depression. Some bodies don’t get health care. Bodies must vote to be counted in this election. Sure, they may only know these things through parodic YouTube videos, but some bodies actually do feel these effects, and actual places and experiences are altered due to media relays. Politics is not just spin, nor is participation. Paul Willis put it this way: “the point is to increase the range, complexity, elegance, self-consciousness and purposefulness of this involvement.” (Common Culture, p. 131)

Agree? disagree? Join the YouTube dialogue, here or there.

Pushing around Henry Jenkins: YouTube Criticism as Cynical Circling

So, I’ve been teaching the second Learning from YouTube class this fall. The more normal one. The one with books. And lately, we’ve been reading Henry Jenkins’ Convergence Culture, after learning from Paul Willis’ related and anticipatory Common Culture. (A quick aside about the use of books in this course: while it allows for a more focused discussion–the professor makes sure the students get the ideas in the readings–it has clearly limited their YouTube creativity–their analysis is inserted into the ready-made framework of an expert).

That said, we had a really interesting class yesterday, and I wanted to share some of our work with Jenkins. When I say we were pushing him around, I use this both as a catchy title, but also to note something more meaningful, something about the linked tone, content and process of our YouTube studies. Which is to say that with Jenkins’ ideas, like seemingly everything else they think about, the approach and take home conclusions are a kind of cynical circling:  the students hover near his ideas, prodding at them gently, perhaps sarcastically, while offering their own criticisms ambiguously, circuitously. Analysis as ironic presentation. Criticism as parodic re-play. I keep asking them to STATE their opinion, and this is their opinion: unsaid, smug, vague, readable both ways. Like the YouTube videos they learn from, their point of view is expressed through self-reflexive and soft satire (note: the videos I linked to here, under soft satire, are from others students’ Jenkins research, you can see more of these projects on our class page: http://www.youtube.com/groups_videos?name=lfyt08).

Agree? disagree? Join the YouTube dialogue, here or there.

Video Vortex Reader: Responses to YouTube (free!)

Video Vortex

about the book: The Video Vortex Reader is the first
collection of critical texts to deal with the rapidly emerging world of
online video – from its explosive rise in 2005 with YouTube, to its
future as a significant form of personal media.

After years of talk about digital convergence and crossmedia
platforms we now witness the merger of the Internet and television at a
pace no-one predicted. These contributions from scholars, artists and
curators evolved from the first two Video Vortex conferences in
Brussels and Amsterdam in 2007 which focused on responses to YouTube,
and address key issues around independent production and distribution
of online video content. What does this new distribution platform mean
for artists and activists? What are the alternatives?

Contributors: Tilman Baumgärtel, Jean Burgess,
Dominick Chen, Sarah Cook, Sean Cubitt, Stefaan Decostere, Thomas
Elsaesser, David Garcia, Alexandra Juhasz, Nelli Kambouri and Pavlos
Hatzopoulos, Minke Kampman, Seth Keen, Sarah Késenne, Marsha Kinder,
Patricia Lange, Elizabeth Losh, Geert Lovink, Andrew Lowenthal, Lev
Manovich, Adrian Miles, Matthew Mitchem, Sabine Niederer, Ana Peraica,
Birgit Richard, Keith Sanborn, Florian Schneider, Tom Sherman, Jan
Simons, Thomas Thiel, Vera Tollmann, Andreas Treske, Peter Westenberg.

colophon: Editors: Geert Lovink and Sabine
Niederer. Editorial Assistance: Marije van Eck and Margreet Riphagen.
Copy Editing: Darshana Jayemanne. Design: Katja van Stiphout. Printer:
Veenman Drukkers, Rotterdam. Publisher: Institute of Network Cultures,
Amsterdam. Supported by: Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences,
School of Design and Communication, and XS4ALL.

Geert Lovink and Sabine Niederer (eds.), Video Vortex Reader: Responses to YouTube, Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2008. ISBN: 978-90-78146-05-6.

Order a free copy by emailing: books@networkcultures.org