My YouTube work has consistently focused on the idea of bad video. As a professor, I teach many courses, including Introduction to
Video Art—where I instruct students on good craft, composition, technique, storytelling, etc. I've had to come to peace with the kinds of unruly YouTube videos (hardly edited, unlit, badly mic-ed, unscripted) that my LFYT students and I engage in: ones that consistently fall outside those standards. It remains an open question for me whether I think amateur-made video should "get better" (more like art video or industrial practice) or if YouTube vernaculars should reshape our ideas of quality.
"The
L Word is an American co-production television drama series originally shown on Showtime portraying the lives of a group of lesbian, bisexual and transgender people and their friends, family and lovers in the trendy Los Angeles–area city of West Hollywood, California. The show ran from 2004 to 2009."
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In "The Value of the Unpopular,"
Jutta Treviranus writes, "Theoretical proofs and empirical evidence show that diverse perspectives benefit groups, society and individuals. Current Web applications, by artificially emphasizing popularity, discourage this diversity."
[cit] If a video is about an obscure, radical, strange, private, or "unimportant" topic, it will sit idle and largely unseen in NicheTube.
NicheTube resonates with the term
underground art which includes: "copy culture, web-based and email art, comix, animation, zine and fan culture, activism, totally disappeared artists of the 1960s and 70s, marginal and experimental art, guerilla gardening, mining, rubbish dumps, living underground and archiving the underground."
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Continue "NicheTube/Popularity"