Feb 29, 2008
Henry Jenkins responses to the 24/7 DIY video summit
Envisioning the Future of DIY – part 1, Ulrike Reinhard, who is blog (video records of the panel)
DIY 24/7 video summit plenary panel titled ‘Envisioning the Future of DIY Video’. From the lrike Reinhard’s blog:
Then they started out by giving their best visions of what Rheingold called the activist question: what to do to influence the way the institutions of democratic governance, of cultural production, of knowledge gathering will shape the outcome of DIY media!
Dialogue from a online video recoding by the first speaker Henry Jenkins:
My vision of the future would be one where everyone had the power to participate, and where diversity was valued as central to the enterprise so it is not that we build and they will come, it is not that we construct YouTube and we are automatically at democracy, there is still a struggle to be fought around democracy, it is a struggle in terms of education in terms of teaching media literacies skills to kids, struggle in terms of law, in terms of changing the notion of fair use so we have strong protection on our ability to respond to the stories that are absolutely central to our culture, it involves changing politics, how we mobilise people who are feeling empowered by making videos and turn them loose in the streets to transform society…
From YouTube to WeTube… , Henry Jenkins blog post, February 14, 2008
One of the things that has excited me about YouTube is the ways that it represents a shared portal where all of these different groups circulate their videos, thus opening up possibilities for cross-polination. Yet, as many at the conference suggests, the mechanisms of YouTube as a platform work to discourage the real exchange of work. YouTube is a participatory channel but it lacks mechanisms which might encourage real diversity or the exchange of ideas. The Forums on YouTube are superficial at best and filled with hate speech at worst, meaning that anyone who tries to do work beyond the mainstream (however narrowly this is defined) is apt to face ridicule and harrasment. The user-moderation system on YouTube, designed to insure the best content rises to the top, follow majoritarian assumptions which can often hide minority works from view. Perhaps the biggest problem has to do with the way YouTube strips individual works from their larger contexts…
Thanks for linking to Henry’s post. This is a good criticism of how Youtube could be so awesome, but inherently stops people from really collaborating.