Posts Tagged ‘enthnography’

A while back, an otherwise unknown anthropologist at Kansas State University posted a video to YouTube which captured the imagination of a wide variety of Internet users. Entitled “The Machine Is Us/ing Us,” the video, embedded below, gave an inventive explanation of Web 2.0.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE]

Overtime, that professor, Michael Wesch, has released a number of other videos, each with his unique stylistic flair and educational explanations. Professor Wesch is really doing fascinating work to understand the social implications of our new mediated spaces – YouTube, MySpace, etc.

He recently gave a talk at the Library of Congress about his research.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPAO-lZ4_hU]

It begins explaining the ability of distributed people to challenge the power of traditional media. All the hours of content created by NBC, CBS and ABC since 1948 (1.5 million hours) have been surpassed by amateurs without producers on YouTube in 6 months. His video topped charts even when competing with Super Bowl commercials – typically the king of short duration content. The Numa Numa webcam video became a worldwide phenomenon, replicated by thousands who share they music, dance and joy with millions online.

To Wesch, the anthropologist, media is not content or technology. It is the mediation of human relations. When media change, human relationships change.

He and his students do a lot of research on YouTube and examine the users, video and data. Plenty of old people upload videos, popular videos are often remixed or remade, the majority are home videos, nearly 10,000 videos per day are addressed to the YouTube community.

Is this search of community an outgrowth of a loss of civil society a la Putnam’s Bowling Alone thesis? Networked individualism is the term used to describe the increasing individualism of modern society, but the human nature of desiring community. However, the search for community through webcams has some important implications: one of those is the ‘context collapse’ which comes from speaking to an inanimate object without immediate feedback. Another is the ability to replay and “stare” without seeming rude. Wesch thinks YouTube represents the potential to connect without constraint. “Media do not just distance us, they connect us in different ways.” He points to the Free Hugs movement as an attempt to reconnect to humanity in this networked individuality; and YouTube’s role in spreading Free Hugs is important.

In essence, we all become producers of ourselves, creating identity as we upload and specifically create content to reflect ourselves online. But in doing so, we live in a remix culture which is at odds with the intellectual property laws. Wesch draws on Larry Lessig’s work to explain the criminalization of communication (which, by the way, is the subject of Lessig’s next book). The developing values of the YouTube community are one of oneness. It really is a reason for optimism – and not the blind techno-utopianism associated with many technologies. Wesch has studied the society and shows the great things coming from it.

But perhaps what I like most is that a guy in Kansas – once the epitome of windswept prairie isolation – can become the expert of a worldwide community.