Wednesday 22 June 2011
Life in a Day - filmed by you
Last time I posted the lacture of Michael Wesch from Kansas State University regarding the new powerful change in peoples relations and the possibilities in oneself representation that is possible due to YouTube. That brought to my mind film Life in a Day I have watched month ago during the opening of the Cracow Film Festival. It is a project (or experiment as it is called by “authors”) undertaken on YouTube. Users were asked to submit the videos showing how did they spend 24th of July 2010. I was wandering how will I bear 1,5hour of YouTube-alike films although I can “watch” YouTube for hours without such dilemmas. I suppose I doubted in the change of format. How will YouTube films act on a big screen? How will I react to this clash of media civilizations? My viewer’s experience of YouTube films is far from my cinema experience (private vs. public sphere, dark space in case of cinema etc).
Surprisingly watching Life in a Day was not painful or unpleasant at all. In fact I really believe I could watch this global flow of images all night long.
The discourse of the organizers of the project is very “you-centered”. They underline it intensively that the real author of the film is the “you” - which in fact means the whole community of Internet (YouTube) users. The film is your (our?) perspective on reality. Life in a Day has the strong taste of the Dziga Vertov’s Kino-Pravda (Cinéma vérité). Now everybody can be Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera recording the flow of everyday life in which trivial elements and everyday life routine is not destructive but on contrary intriguing phenomenon.
The montage of users’ films from all over the world gives the impression of participation in the truly global text in which the western oppressive perspective is less visible than on the other audiovisual platforms such as news. It looks like the strategy of “global Hollywood”* does not work in this case. We can see images from non-dominant countries (as I call regions usually labeled as Third World) shot by inhabitants of these regions, although some of them must have been shot by western “cameramen” as they reveal the surprise of the local customs and reality. However in fact the questioning the strategy of global Hollywood is quite naïve here because the creator of the project is still the western big production studio under the name-brand of Ridley Scott. It constantly upkeeps the division into creative, vibrant prestigious western center, and the rest of the world where the brilliant ideas are realized. All 4,500 hours of footage sent from all over the world had been seen, selected and edited in the western cultural paradigm.
Although many doubts occur (including the question of authorship – on the screeing in Cracow the author of Polish fragment of the film was present, although he was the author of 20-seconds image that neither me nor any of my friends have noticed , is it a real authorship?) Life in a Day seems to be a new quality as far as use the power of networked individuals in creating the new cultural text.
* T. Miller, N. Govil, J. McMurria, R. Maxwell, Global Hollywood, British Film Institute, London 2001 the idea of the mechanism of global Hollywood was inspired by F. Fröbel, J. Heinrich, O. Kreye, The New International Division of Labour, Cambridge University
Press, London, New York 1980.
Saturday 18 June 2011
Digital Ethnography @ Kansas State University
Below please find great presentation of professor Michael Wesch giving the taste of the anthropological approach to new media platforms.
Enjoy:
0:00 Introduction, YouTube's Big Numbers
2:00 Numa Numa and the Celebration of Webcams
5:53 The Machine is Us/ing Us and the New Mediascape
12:16 Introducing our Research Team
12:56 Who is on YouTube?
13:25 What's on Youtube? Charlie Bit My Finger, Soulja Boy, etc.
17:04 5% of vids are personal vlogs addressed to the YouTube community, Why?
17:30 YouTube in context. The loss of community and "networked individualism" (Wellman)
18:41 Cultural Inversion: individualism and community
19:15 Understanding new forms of community through Participant Observation
21:18 YouTube as a medium for community
23:00 Our first vlogs
25:00 The webcam: Everybody is watching where nobody is ("context collapse")
26:05 Re-cognition and new forms of self-awareness (McLuhan)
27:58 The Anonymity of Watching YouTube: Haters and Lovers
29:53 Aesthetic Arrest
30:25 Connection without Constraint
32:35 Free Hugs: A hero for our mediated culture
34:02 YouTube Drama: Striving for popularity
34:55 An early star: emokid21ohio
36:55 YouTube's Anthenticity Crisis: the story of LonelyGirl15
39:50 Reflections on Authenticity
41:54 Gaming the system / Exposing the System
43:37 Seriously Playful Participatory Media Culture (featuring Us by blimvisible: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yxHKgQyGx0
47:32 Networked Production: The Collab. MadV's "The Message" and the message of YouTube
49:29 Poem: The Little Glass Dot, The Eyes of the World
51:15 Conclusion by bnessel1973
52:50 Dedication and Credits (Our Numa Numa dance)
It is really interesting presentation about anthropological approach to new media platforms with special devotion to YouTube not only as a new media tool, but mainly as a new mean of users expression and a new experience of being in touch (with who – that is completely other issue).
YouTube is not only one application – it is an element of the whole bunch of sites connected in an interactive net, in which all elements can and do influence each other. It is a new relation within mediasphere, that in television would be called intertextuality I suppose. Here the convergence (in the sense Henry Jenkins uses it) is more applicable term catching the sense of the media practices users are performing. Peoples’ activity links platform such as dig, del.icio.us, blogs, YouTube, Facebook…
I suppose YouTube is a great victory of everyday lifa and simple pleasures. As Michael Wesch shows in his presentation most of the videos on YouTube are home videos – simple and funny. On the other hand vlogs present the great deal of self- and technology awareness.
I really like author’s perspective - that shows great deal of anthropological (and ethnographical) sensitivity – presenting media not as its contant or even useful tool of human communication but rather as the milieu of human RELATIONS. I do really wonder if the same tale told a friend face-to-face is different when recorded on vlog or described on blog. If it changes once released to (potentially) hundreds of viewers/readers. If it changes when there is noone physically close to me – there is only computer. I believe there is a change in relation not only the mean of communication. That is the question of human experience which is far more than only the story telling.
Enjoy:
0:00 Introduction, YouTube's Big Numbers
2:00 Numa Numa and the Celebration of Webcams
5:53 The Machine is Us/ing Us and the New Mediascape
12:16 Introducing our Research Team
12:56 Who is on YouTube?
13:25 What's on Youtube? Charlie Bit My Finger, Soulja Boy, etc.
17:04 5% of vids are personal vlogs addressed to the YouTube community, Why?
17:30 YouTube in context. The loss of community and "networked individualism" (Wellman)
18:41 Cultural Inversion: individualism and community
19:15 Understanding new forms of community through Participant Observation
21:18 YouTube as a medium for community
23:00 Our first vlogs
25:00 The webcam: Everybody is watching where nobody is ("context collapse")
26:05 Re-cognition and new forms of self-awareness (McLuhan)
27:58 The Anonymity of Watching YouTube: Haters and Lovers
29:53 Aesthetic Arrest
30:25 Connection without Constraint
32:35 Free Hugs: A hero for our mediated culture
34:02 YouTube Drama: Striving for popularity
34:55 An early star: emokid21ohio
36:55 YouTube's Anthenticity Crisis: the story of LonelyGirl15
39:50 Reflections on Authenticity
41:54 Gaming the system / Exposing the System
43:37 Seriously Playful Participatory Media Culture (featuring Us by blimvisible: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yxHKgQyGx0
47:32 Networked Production: The Collab. MadV's "The Message" and the message of YouTube
49:29 Poem: The Little Glass Dot, The Eyes of the World
51:15 Conclusion by bnessel1973
52:50 Dedication and Credits (Our Numa Numa dance)
It is really interesting presentation about anthropological approach to new media platforms with special devotion to YouTube not only as a new media tool, but mainly as a new mean of users expression and a new experience of being in touch (with who – that is completely other issue).
YouTube is not only one application – it is an element of the whole bunch of sites connected in an interactive net, in which all elements can and do influence each other. It is a new relation within mediasphere, that in television would be called intertextuality I suppose. Here the convergence (in the sense Henry Jenkins uses it) is more applicable term catching the sense of the media practices users are performing. Peoples’ activity links platform such as dig, del.icio.us, blogs, YouTube, Facebook…
I suppose YouTube is a great victory of everyday lifa and simple pleasures. As Michael Wesch shows in his presentation most of the videos on YouTube are home videos – simple and funny. On the other hand vlogs present the great deal of self- and technology awareness.
I really like author’s perspective - that shows great deal of anthropological (and ethnographical) sensitivity – presenting media not as its contant or even useful tool of human communication but rather as the milieu of human RELATIONS. I do really wonder if the same tale told a friend face-to-face is different when recorded on vlog or described on blog. If it changes once released to (potentially) hundreds of viewers/readers. If it changes when there is noone physically close to me – there is only computer. I believe there is a change in relation not only the mean of communication. That is the question of human experience which is far more than only the story telling.
Netnography: obstacles
One of the most problematic issues concerning the netnographical method is the problem of participation and the participant observation on one hand and the ethics and the requirement to reveal my identity as a researcher on the other. That is the point where the announced fall of the observer’s paradox seems to be far too premature.
The participant observation, the method that was the main way of getting to know how people live and act in social context when they are not observed, was doomed to failure as long as researcher was visibly present. Netnography seems to reduce this overwhelming presence to minimum and gives access to peoples behaviours and expressions just as they are. And here lies the problem of participating in the researched online group. Once I reveal my academic background and research intentions I ruin the “nature state” of the group. I am a kind of invader who is the Other, who is observing and asking questions. On the other hand I cannot conduct research pretending to be the newbe.
I am afraid I simply do not believe in full participation (which is an integral part of netnographic procedure) once researcher admits his/her identity. At the same time I do feel that the Internet is a great milieu for a truly anthropological action. For action that is far beyond content analysis or even interviews with online group members. That is becoming a part of the group, taking actions they take, knowing the language they use.
These are the questions I am asking myself on the threshold of my research on this and this online community. Bothe of them are Polish communities of the Deaf. I really wonder how to approach these users to be accepted and gain access to the maximum of activities and senses they create there. This research is connected with my participation in conference about excluded actors of social scene. I would like to investigate how the Deaf are using the Internet as a tool of compensating the off-line inequalities.
The participant observation, the method that was the main way of getting to know how people live and act in social context when they are not observed, was doomed to failure as long as researcher was visibly present. Netnography seems to reduce this overwhelming presence to minimum and gives access to peoples behaviours and expressions just as they are. And here lies the problem of participating in the researched online group. Once I reveal my academic background and research intentions I ruin the “nature state” of the group. I am a kind of invader who is the Other, who is observing and asking questions. On the other hand I cannot conduct research pretending to be the newbe.
I am afraid I simply do not believe in full participation (which is an integral part of netnographic procedure) once researcher admits his/her identity. At the same time I do feel that the Internet is a great milieu for a truly anthropological action. For action that is far beyond content analysis or even interviews with online group members. That is becoming a part of the group, taking actions they take, knowing the language they use.
These are the questions I am asking myself on the threshold of my research on this and this online community. Bothe of them are Polish communities of the Deaf. I really wonder how to approach these users to be accepted and gain access to the maximum of activities and senses they create there. This research is connected with my participation in conference about excluded actors of social scene. I would like to investigate how the Deaf are using the Internet as a tool of compensating the off-line inequalities.
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