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Video Vortex

By Holly Willis
October 12, 2008
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Videovortex

The Institute of Network Cultures, founded by Amsterdam-based media theorist Geert Lovink in 2004, released its fourth reader last Friday. Titled Video Vortex Reader: Responses to YouTube and edited by Lovink and his colleague Sabine Niederer, the book features 34 essays by an international group of writers tackling YouTube video. Rather than simply adopt the usual positions - the celebratory enthusiasm around social media and amateur video production or the highly critical lament about the rampant stupidity of most YouTube fare and the incredible waste of time spent watching clever cats flush toilets - the book instead really looks at YouTube videos as political, cultural and social practices across a spectrum of users.Five of the essays are by Southern California writers, including filmmaker and Pitzer College professor Alexandra Juhasz; Marsha Kinder and Patricia Lange of USC; media theorist Lev Manovich from U.C. San Diego; and Elizabeth Losh, Writing Director of the Humanities Core Course at U.C. Irvine; the strong group and its contributions points to the rich network of new media thinkers here.


Elizabeth Losh, who in addition to directing the writing program at U.C. Irvine is also the writer of the must-read daily blog Virtualpolitik, contributed "Government YouTube: Democracy, Surveillance, and Legalism in State-Sanctioned Online Video Channels." The essay charts the ways in which various governmental agencies deploy YouTube, but ultimately end up making use of its form more than its function. Describing the TSA YouTube channels, which attempt to offer a positive view of airport security systems and officials, Losh explains that they may seem to promote openness and transparency but instead "underscore the value of secrecy by justifying a rhetoric of obstruction." She moves through several other agencies and their unwieldy attempts to use YouTube, showing that their lack of commitment to dialogue and the participatory promise of YouTube reflects not only an authoritarian agenda, but points to the fact that YouTube itself may appear to be about community and participation, but is really about celebrity and spectacle. Losh concludes by pointing to the power Google holds as the owner not just of YouTube, but of a major search engine and tools for email, blogging, document creation, and even mapping. Her conclusion? We should be wary...

One of the most compelling ideas in the book appears in Geert Lovink's introduction, when he claims, "We no longer watch films or TV; we watch databases." What does he mean by that? Simply that as YouTube viewers, we're less interested in the experience of long-form storytelling and more interested in searching and collecting. We view in order to accrue. By extension, we gather in order to remix and combine, forming new combinations of videos that in turn begin to reflect who we are.

But it's more than that. The 90-minute story has its merits to be sure, but the database has its own unique pleasures. USC School of Cinematic Arts professor Marsha Kinder explains in her essay, "The Conceptual Power of Online Video: 5 Easy Pieces," that the database as a form is defined by its ability to call attention to the processes of selection and combination. We see how cinematic stories function by seeing their parts on display. Think of a film such as Memento, where the backwards order of scenes calls attention to how films are typically structured, and a good part of the pleasure in watching the film is in figuring out the system - the algorithm - that makes the story hold together. And an understanding of those structures and algorithms drives a lot of contemporary cultural practices. As Lovink points out, "Allowing oneself to be led by an endlessly branching database is the cultural constant of the early 21st century." Is it? We certainly can see the splintering of stories across multiple screens all over the city. But at the same time, some of the strongest stories that seem most appealing these days are sprawling miniseries or TV shows that bring us back week after week....

Video Vortex is available as a free PDF download or send an email requesting a copy to books@networkcultures.org. More info here.

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