Fun With You Tube IV
YouTube, as others have shown, is always fun when you see the associations, the links, the connections - many of which pop up after a video is shown or are visible on the sidebar of a given video. Categories extend - not by a taxonomy - but by user production and labeling. And by how other users interact with that process.
Take “beer” as a category, for instance. Don’t mind if I do. A recent email I received from a listserv I’m on asked about this place:
(I love the comments left…turns out this is the store at the Achel brewery).
That video led me to the Lego Beer Song:
And that video led me to this mashup:
And that led me to this “instructional” mashup:
And eventually this Macgyver-esque commercial:
And finally, my favorite, The Bud Ice Penguin:
Surfing through these moments - the amateur, the professional, the advertisement, the remix - is fascinating. And as many of my recent posts remark, I keep getting drawn into the idea of a fascinating Web, one not driven by literary production or aesthetics or profoundness or the political. But one more akin to the canonical Arcades Benjamin romanticized or the drift Barthes encourages. There is pleasure in this kind of Web - not a highbrow response (”oh that’s not video!”) nor an aesthetic dismissal (”how idiotic!”), but a pleasure of seeing and writing, of viewing other’s responses, other’s moments of silliness, other’s interests. The highbrow or dismissal are professional responses; academic responses, responsible responses. They also feel anything but satisfying. The YouTube surf doesn’t need to pretend to aspire to such values; and its uploaders don’t need to either.
In assembling my syllabus, I thought of making use of this sort of drift. The assignment would be based in YouTube or some-other user-generated-content site, and would require students to catalog their drift between videos (or what have you, depending on the site), and then try to explain the relationships and transitions from one to the next in an essay.
I ended up not doing this assignment for various reasons, but I wonder if trying to explain the pleasurable drift is sort of antithetical. . .isn’t the pleasure found in the serendipitous wandering from one clip to the next? Does it need reason or rationale? The trick then would be to draft the assignment such that it relies on the pleasurable drift without forcing an explanation on it. . .but how?!?
Comment by Mitch McG — January 26, 2007 @ 12:04 pm
[…] And finally, I relate quite a bit to Jeff’s YouTube surfing efforts. […]
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