The idea of flow videos was developed by my
Fall 2008 LFYT class as we attempted to describe an emerging YouTube genre of home-movie-like videos that were most similar to YouTube's ubiquitous
skateboarder fare: fan-vids about people's actual kinetic practices (not things already made by other people that they found and liked).
Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi "is chiefly renowned as the architect of the notion of flow in creativity; people enter a flow state when they are fully absorbed in activity during which they lose their sense of time and have feelings of great satisfaction."
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Media
flow research has
traditionally understood television as a one-way uninterrupted stream of programming, rather than discrete programs. The flow delivers ads by way of shows. "The inaugural formulation is Raymond William's argument, in his 1974 book
Television: Technology and Cultural Form, that 'the defining feature of broadcasting' is
'planned flow.'"
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Everyday people have long made home movies about their daily lives.
Home movie scholarship looks seriously at this noncommercial production as a resource for academic historiography, allowing us rare access to a people's-eye view of trauma, memory, family, and nation.
YouTube scholars address how the nature of the private (or domestic) has changed online.
Dr. Strangelove reports on his blog: "Home video is far and away the most popular content posted online, shared by 62% of video uploaders."
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