Visual Epidemic

In the video above, the CNN corespondent mentions that grassroots media (bloggers, twitter, facebook) played an important part in the Obama race. This election was not only about this great man, but about a renewed feeling in the American dream. The feeling that together we can make informed decision, that we can effect change, and that when we believe that mistakes have been made we can come together and, well, make a change.

Go through the site, Obama in 30 seconds. You will see this meme reflected over and over in the videos.

Jenkin‘s was right. These videos were not about the candidate, rather the spirit of participatory culture transposed onto participatory democracy. Participatory democracy may seem like an oxymoron on the surface, but if you look at the historically low voter turn-outs in comparison with this election voter turn-out then democracy has been far from participatory for a long, long time. Has new media been the catalyst? I would venture no – not by itself. Blogs were widely used in the last election. I think it is a combination of factors. The mix of weariness of the current regime, the ease of new media tools, and a candidate that was perceived both as an underdog, but also an ‘everyman’. So yes, grassroots media was important in this race, and the youth using this media was important (see video below), but this is not nearly as much a reflection of the affordances of new media as a reflection of the sentiment of the everyman in America. We wanted change, and in the mantra of the Obama campaign we knew that change was just a matter of saying ‘Yes we can’

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Today I learned a new phrase. I have mentioned the portrayal of Swedish youth generated content in the media as highly negative on this blog before. I did not realize, however, that a part of this harassment (mugging someone and filming it) has a name – happy slapping.

Happy slapping is defined by wikipedia as:

Happy slapping is a fad in which someone attacks an unsuspecting victim while an accomplice records the assault (commonly with a camera phone or a smartphone). Most happy-slappers are teenagers or young adults. Several incidents have been extremely violent, and people have been killed. The name can refer to many types of violent assaults, not just slapping, but some rape and sexual assaults have been inaccurately classified as “happy slapping” by the media.^[1]

When one of our new post-docs mentioned the term to me, I did not realize that it referred to this behavior. The use of happy can only be conceived of in a very Clockwork Orange kind of way. As strongly as I believe that youth generated media should seen for its creative and positive aspects, making light of such acts by using such a joyful term is misleading and helps perpetuate the negative myths surrounding youth media.

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As this title states, Henry Jenkins and John Harley, in a recent blog post, are attempting to place YouTube in its historical context.

Points of note:

10 hours of new content every minute (where does this stat come from?)
“YouTube has gone from nowhere to cultural ubiquity in a couple of years because we already know what to do with it.”
Participatory culture is nothing new (although, it goes back farther than explained here – See book, The Victorian Internet for a nice little history of the infrastructure of participatory communication)
From article:

“Many early netizens explicitly embraced the value of participatory culture. These utopian pioneers would greet YouTube’s amateurs not as mindless kids but as the fulfilment of their own hopes and a validation of their predictions.”

“If we want to see a more democratic culture, they argue, we need anti-corporate outlets, greater diversity among participants, more debate about whose work gets seen and how it is valued…”

This news article exemplifies Jenkin’s theory of convergence culture through attributing YouTube’s success to participants making media using prior knowledge from other domains in their lives. I think this is true to a decent extent, but my experience with blogging leads me to believe that this prior knowledge must be passion driven to continue blogging/vlogging, etc. And while this is certainly true of many YouTubbers, I believe it oversimplifies the phenomenon (although this is a small news article, not a journal length one). I don’t think the sheer volume of content uploaded, nor content watched, can be explained through prior knowledge, or even a passion to create. There is also quite a threshold to cross to create and upload video – much more than blogging, for example. While it is great to see research into YouTube culture beginning to seep out, much more information is needed about the actual practices of vlogging – a little participant observation, as well as close analysis of vloggers’ habits.

Another aspect of this article I reacted to was the slight tinge of fear mongering found here. Not the revenge/harassment based that I have discussed here earlier, but fear of the banality of content to be found on the site. Old memes of mental masturbation and emo-filled chart topping karaoke are mixed with the simultaneous discrediting of ‘utopian pioneers’ as dreamers and a taking-up of their cry for anti-corporate outlets for expression.

Jenkins is a phenomenal researcher, and his theory of convergence culture very useful (must finish that book!). I am very much looking forward to further studies of his into YouTube culture (as well as contributing research of my own!)

**Response to blog post and related article in the Sydney Morning Herald, Is YouTube truly the future?**

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