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.
Users have been drawn to YouTube and other Web 2.0 platforms in the name of
community. Whether technology enhances or limits community is much
debated and researched.
"'Yes We Did' provides a slide show of strategic insights from the campaign that redefined modern politics."
[cit] According to the
New York Times: "Like a lot of Web innovators, the Obama campaign did not invent anything completely new. Instead, by bolting together social networking applications under the banner of a movement, they created an unforeseen force to raise money, organize locally, fight smear campaigns and get out the vote that helped them topple the Clinton machine and then John McCain and the Republicans."
[cit]
In "Getting Started," Hillary Clinton contributes a new form of
'bad video.' Interestingly enough, she utilizes the idealized home video in her ad campaign. It seems a direct reflection of scenes that many people record and place onto the Internet (shots of children playing, two brothers opening a restaurant) that may not look out of place in a home movie. However, Clinton also plays into the media popularity of Obama's 2008 campaign. She touches upon popular issues - gay marriage, women's rights - while also maintaining a friendly, but undeniably corporate taste
[cit]. --Amy Griffin, LFYT 2015
Content/form: "Within rhetorical pedagogy it was the practice of imitation that most required students to analyze form and content. They were asked to observe a model closely and then to copy the form but supply new content; or to copy the content but supply a new form. Such imitations occurred on every level of speech and language, and forced students to assess what exactly a given form did to bring about a given meaning or effect ... The divide between form and content is always an artificial and conditional one, since ultimately attempting to make this division reveals the fundamentally indivisible nature of verbal expression and ideas."
[cit]
One of my ten
founding terms for this project is
process. How we make and receive media is as important as the object itself.
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