Visualizing the Mediascape (another step toward an ethnography of YouTube)
Feb 9th, 2008 by Prof Wesch
from the 24/7 DIY Video Summit in Los Angeles …
Several members of yesterday’s panel on The State of the Art made a concerted effort to counter techno-utopian rhetoric and praise of YouTube by critiquing the structure of YouTube as one that shuts out civil and intellectual debate, and fails to build community. To support this argument, panelists offered the example that the YouTube comments section limits reasoned discourse by limiting comments to 500 characters, and further noted that the site is structured to showcase the “most viewed” videos which are often not the most important, interesting, or intellectually stimulating.
All of which is true, but fails to recognize that YouTube is just one piece of a vast mediascape. Good debate may not appear on the site of YouTube itself, but (as the respondent Henry Jenkins, and later Yochai Benkler pointed out) the videos can be embedded in blogs and forums where intellectual debate can flourish. And the “most viewed” videos on the prominent pages of YouTube may not be important, interesting, or intellectually stimulating, but social bookmarking services, memediggers, and social networks often bring the rich, stimulating, and politically important content we want to see right onto our desktops.
As we move forward with our research of YouTube we are increasingly looking at this broader mediascape within which YouTube is just one small part. As a starting point, we are trying to figure out exactly how to visualize this mediascape.
Next week we will be aggregating all of the images of the mediascape we can find on the web and posting them here and on our wiki. Students will then make their own efforts at visualizing this mediascape in static imagery. Ultimately we will be working toward the creation of a video that we hope will visualize the mediascape in a new way that gives people those “Aha!” moments that can inspire this conversation to move forward in interesting and productive ways.
We think understanding this broader context of YouTube is necessary for understanding YouTube itself, but I do agree with the panelists that the structures of YouTube are also important for understanding the kinds of videos and conversations that emerge on the site and throughout the rest of the mediascape. To this end, our research group has identified 58 characteristics or “structures” of YouTube that are different than face-to-face communication. (These were created using a Google Document in March 2007 and recently transferred to our open wiki. They need some work. Feel free to edit.)
Adam Bohannon (class of ‘07) used some of these structures to pose some great questions in a video he created for this class last year (skip to the 2:02 mark):
All of the ‘07 student projects built from an understanding of these structures in some way. For example, Lee Redlingshafer applied these to his study of popularity on YouTube:
As we move forward with this class of 2008, we need to expand and revise these structures of YouTube to reflect the reality that YouTube exists in this broader mediascape, and begin considering the implications of this.
Twitter is an even better example to illustrate the importance of viewing an application in the broader context of the entire mediascape. Twitter itself is, quite frankly, stupid. Not only does it appear to be stupid but more importantly it seems to foster stupid conversation and the alarmist might note that if we talk stupid we become stupid, etc. This was clearly the fear of panelists yesterday, and Twitter would seem to be the perfect example as it far outshines YouTube both in terms of banality and time-suck. But all of that misses out on the fact that Twitter exists within a much larger mediascape of other media, services, and applications. Twitter is not *just Twitter*. Twitter becomes another mode of communication, among many, and slightly transforms those other modes as it enters the mediascape. Our study of YouTube cannot be the same after Twitter. And Twitter itself is constantly evolving with every new Twitter-app and mashup. In Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin’s wonderful term, all media are “remediated” every time a new medium enters the scene. Today we are in the midst of continuous remediation , and the old familiar binaries we slip into while discussing new media (amateur/pro, consumer/producer, DIY/commercial, and even public/private) are starting to seem too blunt or perhaps more to the point: irrelevant.
“Twitter itself is, quite frankly, stupid.” I’m surprised by this remark as it seems rather coarse. Twitter does not position itself as anything other than a simple means of updating and sharing your status and thinking to others. It serves a purpose as link to others which is less cumbersome and intrusive than Bebo or Facebook. I’m unsure if you are saying the use of Twitter is stupid (i.e. it does not allow for a fully fledged conversation) or that the medium itself (i.e. 140 characters pushed to followers) is stupid.
Carson, I meant to argue that Twitter is NOT stupid (but that it is frequently perceived as stupid because people fail to see that it is just one more mode of communication among many). Twitter *by itself* is stupid. I love Twitter. But it is only useful and fantastic because of the way it fits into a broader mediascape of other tools, applications, and media.
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.
[...] Visualizing the Mediascape (another step toward an ethnography of YouTube) (tags: ???) [...]
[...] 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 [...]
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
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.
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.
[...] including human rights, where it is embedded and re-contextualized - I particularly appreciate Michael Wesch’s commentary on [...]
girl boy joke green day letter ibm
america speed stone boat house black ugly microsoft are man boy
all house white house girl deliver dog joke