Comments on: Visualizing the Mediascape (another step toward an ethnography of YouTube)

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By: From Rodney King to Burma: An Interview with Witness’s Sam Gregory :: MIT Center for Future Civic Media

Thu, 03 Apr 2008 17:20:37 +0000

[...] including human rights, where it is embedded and re-contextualized - I particularly appreciate Michael Wesch’s commentary on [...]

By: Prof Wesch

Prof Wesch — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 19:15:57 +0000

Hi Lisette,
Thank you for the very thoughtful comment. Were you at the 24/7 DIY event? There are some really interesting things going on at USC in this domain. Check out Mimi Ito’s work as a starting point.

By: Lissette

Lissette — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 07:41:16 +0000

YouTube is only a small part of the mediascape. The criticisms levied at the site by those individuals on “The State of the Art” panel at the 24/7 DIY Video Summit, as portrayed within your post, certainly did not seem to take this fact into account. As you point out, Henry Jenkins and Yochai Benkler do make mention of the fact that users embed videos into their blogs and other forums for public discussion and so in this regard they do address YouTube as only a component of a larger phenomenon. But, overall, it seems as though the time would have been better spent if the panelists critiqued the structural limitations of YouTube while emphasizing users and how they cope with/navigate around these limitations. A deeper exploration and discussion of how users interface with YouTube to create community and advance discourse within other locales would probably draw attention to how users impact the mediascape through their manipulation of and interaction with diverse cultural tools.

By looking at what the users are doing and where they are doing it, a web of inter-relatedness among various components of the mediascape would emerge. This would both increase our understanding of the mediascape in terms of where it is and what is currently occurring within it more broadly. I believe it would also facilitate the mapping of the mediascape through the usage of static imagery.

You were absolutely right when you said “We think understanding this broader context of YouTube is necessary for understanding YouTube itself.” We are better able to understand entities by exploring their structures and examining where they are situated within a particular historical context. Your ideas to map the mediascape and create an ethnography of YouTube are ingenious and, honestly, inspire some amount of admiration and envy within me [laughs]. As an individual who does not see herself as particularly involved within this dimension of the social imaginary, I’m extremely interested in learning what is occurring within this sphere. As a student of anthropology, I find your projects to be extremely enterprising and exciting, and hope that the field will continue to produce understanding in areas that it had previously left unexplored.

By: Tom Willerer

Tom Willerer — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 04:30:14 +0000

I thought you might find a documentary I created for an ethnography class at DePaul University interesting. It was all about twitter.

Check it out here and I welcome feedback:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgMUL1QBXz4

By: Savage Minds: Notes and Queries in Anthropology — A Group Blog » Around the Web, 2/10/2008

Mon, 11 Feb 2008 02:12:38 +0000

[...] the future everyone will have 15 minutes of ethnography: Check out Michael Wesch’s posts on the DIY-Video Summit. (If you haven’t seen it, Wesch’s instant-classic video Web 2.0…The Machine is [...]

By: hochan.NET : links for 2008-02-10

hochan.NET : links for 2008-02-10 — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 14:20:05 +0000

[...] Visualizing the Mediascape (another step toward an ethnography of YouTube) (tags: ???) [...]

By: Mary

Mary — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 23:20:43 +0000

I’m always impressed with the types of projects your class is doing… The anthropology department at my school (UC Santa Cruz) may me doing innovative research in other areas, but they don’t have anything remotely like this type of New Media ethnographic work, or at least so it seems. In my ethnography workshop, we just focused on writing the standard sort of linear book-style ethnography, but I think that the kind of stuff you’re doing will really lead the discipline in new directions, especially as technology becomes less and less expensive. I doubt The Book (as a medium) will disappear anytime soon, but undoubtedly (to use Marshall McLuhan as my inspiration) the new Medium will lead to new Messages, or at least allow us to see them in a different light.