ON YOUTUBE FORM EFFECTS IF YOU ARE HEARD
NOTES: Origins and Context | See Also
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Origins of this content
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 these vernaculars should reshape our ideas of quality.
Contextualization
Form refers to the structural and artistic elements that compose a media text. Writes George Linden, "The six general and necessary characteristics for any work of art are: 1) organic unity, 2) theme, 3) thematic variation, 4) balance, 5) hierarchy, and 6) evolution."[cit]

Video blogs add video to blogs: "a video blog is the new hot way for people to stick their personal lives on the internet! Not just simple words, static pictures, or grainy audio. They invite you to join them where-ever they go; meet their friends, their family, go on vacation, fall in love, and all vicariously from the comfort of your home computer."[cit]

The distinction between amateurs and experts are said to be changing because of the Internet. The results of this increased access are debated: "Digital utopians have heralded the dawn of an era in which Web 2.0—distinguished by a new generation of participatory sites like MySpace.com and YouTube.com, which emphasize user-generated content, social networking and interactive sharing—ushers in the democratization of the world: more information, more perspectives, more opinions, more everything, and most of it without filters or fees."[cit]

One of my ten founding terms for this project is form. We are always debating: Do you need radical form to convey revolutionary messages?
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More videos related to the content of this page
The bad form of a vblog propels its movement by marking its veracity and authenticity.
But using bad form on other genres of video can limit the effectiveness of your message, both in how well it can be understood and in how many people will be moved to watch and listen.
The space of the mundane and hand of the amateur are signalled by bad video.