To say the least, this week's mediation, video, was an extremely interesting one. Learning about YouTube in order to explain video's mediation was fun, but at times quite frustrating. First of all, I am not sure any of us can say that we sat through and watched every single video posted on this week's readings. In addition, I think many of us have viewed a lot of these videos previously. With that said, it is fair to say that we all have used YouTube at one point or another, maybe as a producer and more commonly as a viewer/comsumer.
I was really struck by a statement I came across in the Juhasz article, that "we are looking at ourselves when looking at the internet". This really was shocking to me, because I think it is extremely true-espeically when it comes to using YouTube. Anyone and everyone has used YouTube to not only view "popular" videos, but to use it to create anything they want others to view. "We teach the machine" like Juhasz says. We are constantly seeing others posting the most interesting to the most mundane things on video, or posting these eccentric to hilarious videos ourselves. I identify with this specifically when I immediately linked this control we have over the internet with how my friend (who shall remain anonymous for good reason) would go onto Wikipedia and add in ridiculous and completely false facts and information under whichever topic he wanted to screw up. This type of manipulation completely parallels Juhasz's thought that we need to by cynical enough to see through the ridiculousness that people upload onto YouTube, and that this type of mediation limits the truly revolutionary potential of technology. The fact that I had previously seen and heard about the Miss Teen USA 2007 response to an interview question made me feel worse about myself.
Another very startling connection I made with this same article was of the suicide of a homosexual boy after his roommate videotaped his sexual encounter and streamed it on YouTube. This type of action is volatile and completely wrong in every way, and it supports the thought that no matter how "popularity" (as Juhasz states) has affected our lives, it is the wrong way to govern our culture's most popular videos. The most popular videos are at times the most funny, but are often the most humiliating and detrimental. Although this connection I personally made is a frightening one, it often happens entirely too much and shows specifically what individuals are capable of doing.
The main thing I got out of the Learning From YouTube YouTours was that watching that many videos makes me completely agree with Juhasz in that it is a complete waste of time. Don't get me wrong, identifying the influence YouTube imparts on our lives is extremely valuable and has its merit, but I found myself being happy when my hour of watching videos was over (similar to many of you I'm sure). I always thought that YouTube did nothing but connect people and communities, but after seeing so many videos I realized that it is nothing but a mess that returns the production, consumption, and meaning to the individual-isolating them, judging them, and deeming them "most viewed" or "bad".
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When I first think of Youtube, my thoughts instantly jump to entertainment. The ease with which information is accessed is grand, and all of this is due simply to uploading videos, whether from an amateur or corporate standpoint. Juhasz’s article on the 5 lessons of YouTube reveals some significant points, two of which stick out in my mind. The first of this pair is her idea of advertisement. It is clever, on behalf of video makers and businesses, for the video’s titles and opening clips to misrepresent the true content of the video. The perfect example of this is the “Soulja Boy Instructional Dance”, which actually turns out to be a guide on constructing a paper airplane. If not for this description or still picture image, why else would someone wishing to learn how to dance like Soulja Boy click on that video? Or in Juhasz’s Videobook, how “Tour on Black People in Youtube” is tagged under “activism”. Juhasz claims that such actions go against the democratic freedom to which we are entitled.
In her video entitled “Summary of Learning from YouTube at the midterm 2”, Juhasz seems to contradict herself, which is the second point on which I dwelled. Her first point was that “YouTube is not a good site for higher learning” while her last argument stated that Youtube is in fact sufficient for higher learning. I took this to mean the following: although the content and depth of Youtube is not adequate to gain any true educational value due to the perpetuation of stereotypes, popular culture, common knowledge, etc., we are still able to learn the dynamics and ideals behind it, thus making the topic of Youtube an educational tool. To refute this stance, we could take into consideration videos created for instructive purposes, whether its aim is to explain the process of meiosis, or to give steps on cooking a specific dish. Although these subject matters may be common knowledge to some, it may not be to others, therefore making Youtube an accessible avenue for explanation.
In all, the hour spent perusing through her Videobook and watching so many videos did at times feel like “a complete waste of time” as stated in the lead post. This is could be because the videos I viewed had no relevance to what I may have been interested in at that instant, or because I would not have [intentionally] invested as much time watching random videos.
I agree with the value of YouTube in our society lying mainly in the entertainment realm instead of in the educational realm. Although there is much to be learned about how we use YouTube in our everyday lives, I could not help but feel the same relief as Jen when my hour of video watching was over. One of the videos from Juhasz’s article suggests that YouTube is an entity used for the instant gratification of entertainment with instant connections to other related mindlessly entertaining videos. I felt that I was exemplifying this idea of instant gratification when I started rolling my eyes every time I realized a video was longer than 5 minutes. There were times where I started skipping through these videos trying to get to the “main point.” When I realized my impatience with the videos and my want to instantly know the message they were trying to convey, I was angry with myself that I was the exact person that they were talking about who abuse YouTube for its instant gratification of entertainment. I immediately was allowing my brain to categorize the information in the videos being shown to me in different schemas for my own convenient purposes. This also relates the argument that Juhasz brings up about videos gaining popularity. I agree with Jen that it is wrong to let the fact that something is popular shape the way we think about things, especially because the most popular videos are detrimental to a specific person, place or idea in some way. Overall, I agree that YouTube is a waste of time and that although entertaining, we should not look to it as a source of credible information.
I agree with Juhasz that the revolutionary potential of YouTube has been limited by it’s own basic design principles. Juhasz notes that YouTube’s “architecture supports the popular” at the expense of originality and creativity by cataloging likes, dislikes, comments, and number of times watched. Juhasz notes that while this produces some sense of order, YouTube is still a “mess” of videos because a “searching eye creates the greatest revenue”. While I would agree with Juhasz that advertising and design have curtailed YouTube’s revolutionary potential, I think the viewing practices of the individual have had an even greater effect. In both her video book and her article she repeatedly asks the question of how a video makes it to the YouTube front page. From personal experience, my only use for the YouTube front page is the search bar. The vast majority of the time I spend on YouTube I have a video in mind or a specific search in mind before I even get to the site. In this sense, YouTube represents our need as consumers for instant-gratification. Personally, I have never associated education and instant gratification together. I believe this is why I found the video book so frustrating. A five or six minute video of one person talking does not capture my interest comparatively. I found it strange that towards the end of the hour, I was more eager to read text of her lengthy analysis than watch another clip of her or one of her students. Like Jen, I was happy when my hour ended, and could not have agreed with Juhasz more that the vast majority of YouTube videos, including those in her own video book, are a complete waste of time.
-Daniel Gergen
In class, we talked about the relationship between politics, community and self-expression. We talked about how through video, people can express themselves in a way that can unsettle the power of politics, a way to form an oppositional form of community as a counterpoint to the imagined communities. This is evident in many of the videos on YouTube. We see in them a desire for an avenue to satisfy this need for control. YouTube provides that place where you can post a video of yourself singing a favorite song or of little children singing to each other. A place where you can post funny videos or lectures on astrophysics. It is that all encompassing area for the dissemination of information that is free of constraints. So they think. Later, they realize that like Juhasz writes, “YouTube is not democratic. Its architecture supports the popular.” In regards to this dissemination of information, Juhasz explores the ability of YouTube to educate by both compiling a video book and offering a class. Although she acknowledges its use as entertainment, it can also shed some light into the anthropology of culture in the 21st century. Why do we watch these videos? How do they work? What do we learn from them about ourselves?
One of the videos I watched during the assignment made me want to barf. It had the title “Men love bitches”, featuring a cowboy, looking to find his cowgirl. Here is a list of phrases from the video. “Color me horny. The only thing I love to do more than partying is partying. I’m hotter than the sun dipped in Tabasco sauce.” Although it is disheartening to see people make fools of themselves, I wonder why this video had so many hits. Well, we might agree that these videos are funny. But why? Certain moral ideals are engrained in us from birth. We know that people value humility, modesty and self-respect. We have been taught to differentiate between activities performed in private verses public. With the camera, that distinction between private and public goes away. We are able to see this blatant disregard of our ideals and find it amusing not that people would do this per say, but that they would post their actions for public consumption.
-Emmanuel Ohuabunwa
After browsing these two websites, I think it can be said that everyone is more critical or at least more aware of the absurdity of some of the videos on YouTube. The thing that makes me most critical about YouTube is its ability to reaffirm stereotypes. Like the “Express Yourself” video shown in class, minorities must fit these stereotypes in order to be noticed because the public does not care about ideas that do not fit into their schemas. As Juhasz writes, “YouTube draws users by fueling a desire for self-expression and community.” However true this may be, the public is not going to watch a video that does not fit into what is common and comfortable to them. Although many have watched the video of the beauty pageant where the girl appears “dumb”, very few would watch a video if the girl had a smart, insightful answer. Whatever community YouTube is creating, it is just trying to reaffirm stereotypes for a good laugh. I do think that YouTube is inhibiting the potential of technology. If businesses and companies are interested in making websites that are going to be popular, then another website like YouTube is completely acceptable to them. Technology has brought us a lot of good in the past decade, but using it to create communities like YouTube is not a way we should be trying to utilize our technology.
One of the main questions that I had when watching the popular videos featured in Juhasz article was why in the world would anyone want to watch these videos in the first place? How do videos even become popular on YouTube? I think Juhasz says it best with an analogy; "As is true in high school, popularity gauges something. It lets the talented, if unoriginal and uncritical rise to the top. Popular YouTube videos are interchangeable and indistinguishable, entertaining but not threatening, they speak to a middle of the road sensibility in and about the forms of mainstream culture and media". If this is really what mainstream culture warrants, I am very disappointed. As Emmanuel mentioned in his response, I was also disgusted by the dating show video, especially because it represented women in a degrading way. Is this really what the country finds entertaining? How could anyone grant merit to this video?
In class we discussed the importance of identity. Whether it is "black, white, American or European", the language of identity plays a large role in the representation of ourselves. I found this especially relevant when Juhasz mentioned the video, "Blacks on YouTube" (Part 1 and 2). She prefaces the videos by saying that “the most popular videos about black people reinforce the standard view of our society (about black hyper-sexuality, low intelligence, and gonzo-violence”. The politics of representation are playing a huge role in this issue. Despite other’s attempt to represent their race in a positive light, such as the niche videos presented in part 2, they are pushed to the side and ignored. Even worse, they are presented with racist and repulsive comments with words that identify black people in a negative way. Most of the popular videos on YouTube are found entertaining because YouTube viewers enjoy watching others being humiliated. That is what makes shows like Tosh.0 so popular. But are these videos really a true representation of our community? They are not, or at least I hope they are not.
While reviewing the videos and the readings, I came across the phrase "we are looking at ourselves when looking at the internet" (Juhasz). I spent a good hour and a half watching videos. After the first full 8 videos, I started scrolling down to the ones that seemed to be of more interest to me and waited the 2 minutes and let them upload. I found some were funny and entertaining but then I found others that were simply stupid. When I think of YouTube, I think of going there for entertainment like Belinda Ikpoh said in her blog. I go on YouTube to find something funny or different to help cheer me up or find something to send to my friends and cheer them up as well. When I go to the home page, the first thing I notice is the “recommended for you” and the “most viewed” areas. Sometimes I pick the video clips that I see on the home page. I also kind of think to myself why would I be interested in seeing those video clips or what was I looking at last time that made these clips come up? People put a lot of ridiculous things on YouTube and it makes me wonder what are they thinking when they do this.
One video I watched which made me think a lot was “Blacks on YouTube.” The video described “how can you find a black person on YouTube.” Up came a list that went on and on describing black people in all sorts of different ways and many of them were just terrible.
I would rather go on stumbleupon.com than go browsing on YouTube because stumbleupon.com goes to sites that I am more interested in whereas YouTube’s related videos almost always lead me to something weird or irrelevant and much of it is of no interest to me.
What I learned from this lesson on videos is that I am glad I do not have an account on YouTube.
-Chase Winter
I would agree with Belinda. I went through Juhasz's videobook, and while it was interesting I had seen a few of the videos already. I found the video about Blacks to be the most profound, however. It was extremely saddening to find that most of the videos of Blacks were about topics that are strongly stigmatized, or things that people generally view as very negative according to societal norms. I didn't find Juhasz's work to be very helpful to my learning experience because it just seemed like a compilation of what I could already find on Youtube, but at the same time, I realized much TV has changed and continues to change. Just a decade ago, I couldn't picture so many people getting famous from posting their videos on line, but now posting on Youtube is pretty much commonplace.
Learning from Youtube proved to be one of the most interesting pieces I've looked at in a long time. Though I was somewhat frustrated by the way I navigated through it, and how many videos there were and how long some of those videos were (or how short some of them were), I felt compelled to keep looking through it for hours. That is very much parallel to the way the internet and youtube commands our attention. Many people get lost watching youtube videos for hours ( I know I have). So although I was annoyed at the resource, I found myself unable to put it down (not that I could have "put down" the video book as I can an article, which may be part of why it is so attention capturing). I especially liked the part about censorship in the resource. In some ways though, the interaction between the censorship message and the message about the african american portrayal in YouTube were contradictory. By that I mean that on one hand Juhasz argues that the censorship on youtube limits free expression, but then criticizes us for watching things that express messages a certain way that we may think should be censored. At the end of the day I can reconcile this in my mind by thinking of it as a statement that we should be allowed to upload whatever we want but that the stuff that we then decide to watch says something about our culture. In any case, Learning from YouTube was a really special medium that I thought perfectly represented what Juhasz was trying to convey.
SYNTHESISING COMMENT
Our conversation started by laying out two of the uses of YouTube: advertisement and instruction. It was eventually decided that the value of the website is more centered around the advertising aspect than the instructive aspect, and therefore entertainment rather than education. This was then taken one step further—to the instant gratification aspect of the website.
It seems that many of us found ourselves frustrated when a video was longer than a few minutes, skipping through to try to get the meat of it without actually watching it, and so on. The class seems to believe that this is because we go to YouTube for quick entertainment, and then wish to be on our way. This could be achieved in a couple ways. Some of us go to the site with a specific video in mind—something to type into the search box that will either give us the exact result we want or at least a certain type of video that matches our search word or phrase. Others go to the site looking to browse. Still, there is instant gratification in the browsing—featured videos are thrown at us as soon as we enter, and we keep clicking and clicking until we find something that fits our needs, something that’s not too long and not too scholastic.
Our choice of video is also shaped by what’s popular, because YouTube’s “architecture supports the popular,” and therefore the site is designed to get certain things shown more than others, and is designed to keep you on for far too long.
Daniel astutely said that he “found it strange that towards the end of the hour, [he] was more eager to read text of [Juhasz’s] lengthy analysis than watch another clip of her or one of her students.” I think this really sums up the overall consensus of how the class felt while perusing Learning From YouTube. A certain resentment for or animosity towards YouTube built up, and this attitude of even preferring to read long text before watching another boring video (monumental for our generation) is the perfect evidence of that. Others go on to say that YouTube reaffirms negative stereotypes, and Chase even points out that he’d rather use Stumbleupon, which could be considered a competitor of YouTube, because it directs him to things he’ll be interested in, not necessarily in video form, and it doesn’t make him feel trapped. YouTube, on the other hand, is not everyone’s site of choice after this discussion.
-Jessica DeBakey
Content vs. Method
While watching “Learning from YouTube” by Alexandra Juhasz, I followed the “Bad Video/Corporate Media” pathway and felt somewhat transported back in time to the presidential elections of 2008. The pathway felt dated to me because it included so many YouTube videos depicting creative and/or cheesy and/or poorly made songs/pleas/arguments in favor of electing President Obama. I found it interesting that I did not experience the same dated feeling about de Zengotita’s “The Numbing of the American Mind,” as this was an article that focused to something in the near past- specifically the reactions of Americans to September 11 due to the overly-mediated quality of our culture. While I felt that de Zengotita and Juhasz were, at a certain level, emphasizing the same point- that as Americans, our lives are mediated to an extreme degree in ways we do not always take time to reflect on- but that in print form, de Zengotita’s emphasis on September 11 did not feel as dated as the imagery presented by Juhasz regarding Obama’s campaign.
These reflections on the YouTube videobook vs. print media emphasized for me the argument that Professor Pandian presented in class about content vs. method. I think that film production has the ability to date an argument in ways that print media does not. Not only may visual imagery more effectively transport you back in time by appealing to multiple senses, but the technology used to produce film may also give away the point in time a film was produced. I also felt, overall, distracted by many of the YouTube videos in Juhasz’s project; the videobook left me wishing for more words or interactive scenes with her class during which she could explain her purpose more clearly than in 2-sentence blurbs below different YouTube clips that sometimes seemed as if they were almost frantically or arbitrarily picked in an attempt to support her point.
-Amy Wharton
It's too bad we didn't have a chance to hash out some of this in person this week, as our "reading" certainly seems to have provoked some strong reactions! I'll be the first to admit that I also felt a wave of relief when I finally unplugged my headphones from my laptop and closed the window to the "book." I had felt compelled to make my way through all of the tours, but could not bring myself at the same time to watch all the videos or even watch hardly any of them through to the end, and so the whole thing felt like an overly intense and even frenetic bout of overconsumption, the kind that leaves you feeling sort of queasy at the end.
Now this may have been precisely the point of the work, to lead us to a point where we were forced, impelled by our own visceral reactions, to come to a certain kind of conclusion about YouTube and the limits of what can be done with it. In fact, I think that one of the greatest challenges this week has been to distinguish YouTube itself from what Juhasz' work is seeking to do with it: I found it very interesting that several of you described your experience as one of an "hour of watching videos" when it seems to me that the point was precisely that these videos were linked together with text and in certain paths of movement through a series of arguments. I find it very interesting that for many of you, that context and its implications was completely swamped by the videos themselves. Perhaps this is one of those instances where we learn mostly by heeding our feeling that we've not learned at all. And perhaps this is also a nice reminder that the choice and form of the medium has so much to do with the message conveyed.
Many of you wrote in similar terms about the content of YouTube videos: a waste of time, amoral at best or reaffirming stereotypes and trading in humiliation at worst, unleashing the worst in ourselves, presenting back to us the worst that we might be able to see and imagine in ourselves if it is indeed ourselves that we are watching here. I think that once again, here, I would encourage us to try to push beyond our own experience to the extent we can. It is worth keeping in mind that Juhasz is not an anthropologist herself, and perhaps is open to making certain kinds of generalizations about YouTube, internet video and contemporary mediation as such that we as anthropologists might want to complexify, differentiate, pose in multiple terms depending on the context in which they are applied. One way of saying this is to suggest that there are many, many "YouTubes," depending on the thread that one is accustomed to following through the website. I log into YouTube, and what is recommended for me typically are lots and lots of Tamil film songs from India, because this is what I tend to watch on YouTube as I work on this book on Indian cinema.
I think it would be important to keep in mind that here as with any other medium, there are many kinds of audiences who might be having many different kinds of experiences: "the popular" can mean many different things. How would we, as anthropologists, come to terms with both the extent of such diversity, as well as the limits it might keep stumbling upon again and again? There are always going to be structural forces and factors at work in any medium that make certain kinds of things visible and make other kinds of things very difficult to see. This is what I was trying to suggest in lecture on Tuesday when I was speaking both about a politics of difference, calling attention both to the possibilities and the difficulties of expressing cultural difference through a platform like video. These are questions that we will keep returning to, throughout the semester.
That last one was me, AP...
Crary’s use of Descates’ understandingg of the camera obscure was as insightful as it was inspiring, because the forms of logic he utilizes can be applied to the way we use the camera presently; to focus on the observer by focusing of the produced image:
“Descartes, the camera obscura was a demonstration of how an observer can know the world "uniquely by perception of the mind." The secure positioning of the self with this empty interior space was a precondition for knowing the outer world. Its enclosedness, its darkness, its categorical separation from an exterior incarnates Descartes's announcement in the Third Meditation, "I will now shut my eves, I shall stop my ears, I shall disregard my senses."” Modernizing Vision
He uses reasoning to decipher the place that the observer plays in the capturing or creating of an image; the observer is in a specific place and time, and decides to capture an image by going into a dark enclosed place in order to understand the outside world. He notes the role of choice and positioning as the representation of subjectivity of the observer, as well as pointing out that the act of capturing and creating an image comes with a responsibility:
“Thus he adds onto the observer's passive role a more authoritative and juridical function to guarantee and to police the correspondence between exterior world and interior representation and to exclude anything disorderly or unruly.” Modernizing Vision
I disagree that, “Nothing now protects or distances the observer from the seductive and sensual brilliance of the sun. The symbolic confines of the camera obscura have crumbled.” Modernizing Vision
In context, I understand the metaphor, but I disagree with the notion that that dark recluse space is gone for the observer to occupy because that space, within the mind exists and is evident in modern photography.
Crary’s work is closely tied with Pinney’s though Pinney writes about a distinctly different time period, over a century later. They are both concerned with the reality and objectivity of the image, both saying that the observer is an a factor in the creation of an image, and that that image is not and cannot be a documentation of objective reality, but rather a specific and subjective image created by the observer using the camera as an apparatus.
Pinney introduces a new concept that reality may not be the ultimate goal and that photography in India may have moved along a separate timeline using image processing as a way to enhance, if not create, an image using a captured image as a base.
I had never even thought of Youtube as actually creating a system where only certain videos garnered attention. It amazed me to read about how the system selects videos that do not necessarily have rich intellectual content but rather only appeal to the most latent, shallow entertainment goals. Juhasz's second "Youtube lesson" states this quite concisely, saying "Popularity lets the talented rise to the top".
It is quite discouraging for me to realize that even Youtube, a thing which seems to be so free for people to use and transmit thier ideas to the world is still so constricted. It's just as Juhasz says "The more controversial your ideas, the quicker your youtube demise", a phrase that seems to come out of George Orwell's 1984.
I am guilty, just as everyone else is, of using youtube as a time-killer, music player and procrastination tool. But from reading this article, I feel motivated to seek out the more unknown and hidden videos that carry messages and start movements. I will not simply stand by as Youtube controls my viewing opportunities.
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