The Anthropology of Vidding
Yesterday in lecture we watched an hour-long filmed presentation called "an anthropological introduction to YouTube" by Michael Wesch of Kansas State University. Wesch played a small portion of "Us"and discussed it in terms of copyright and remix culture, then segued into a Lawrence Lessig monologue about how we're turning our children into pirates.
In a lot of respects his claims about the transformative nature of YouTube are a little overblown, or at least idealistic, and he definitely focuses more on the positive aspects of the site than the negative or problematic. As my professor pointed out in discussion today, nowhere does Wesch mention that YouTube was bought by Google two years after the site appeared. There's no analysis of the economics of the site or how ads function, much less the automated and difficult to counter copyright policing that happens, or the way YouTube content is now regularly appropriated as a vehicle for direct marketing, like the handy links that allow you to Buy This Song from iTunes or Amazon. Which is okay--one introductory, anthropological film doesn't have to address everything, but I would have liked some acknowledgment of the profit structures in place here. Another aspect of YouTube culture that he touched upon but didn't elaborate was the interconnectedness of what he calls the "mediascape". I tend not to watch a YouTube video unless I see it linked from someone whose blog or journal I follow, or on facebook, or if someone emails me a link.
It was an interesting piece--I was definitely engaged by it throughout, and I think I learned a little bit about the culture of YouTube that I didn't know before. I wouldn't say I loved it, but it definitely gave me a lot to think about with regard to online community and how technologies and use are shaping the cultures of those communities. On a purely personal note, I was thrilled at the Numa Numa video--I remember it making the rounds back in early 2005 and I swear I sat and watched that video a hundred times that week. I also had an almost visceral gut-punch when lim's "Us" came on, late in the presentation, because holy shit, this was class and here was "Us" on the screen! I have watched this vid countless times, spent a great deal of time discussing it with friends, and have even gone through it frame by frame in an attempt to identify each image. The rest of this post comes from a synthesis of a great deal of those discussions, and was helped by friends in a variety of corners of fandom who chose to help me explicate my love of vids in general and this one in particular.
I'd like to focus on "Us" in particular, because while I think Wesch's engagement with the vid is entirely valid and it does work well as a statement against copyright and in support of fair use and remixing, there's more that can and should be said about it as a comment on its specific context, a community which is marginalized and overwhelmingly female. When Wesch says that "these are clips from movies", he neglects that these are clips from beloved fannish media, shows and movies. The images are obscured so much that it's almost impossible to identify them unless you are a member of this community and recognize how they have been collectively invested with incredible emotional weight by fans who love the characters, who have written and read thousands of pages of fanfiction about them, who have painted and drawn them, who have recorded podfic about them, or who have worked and reworked source images into vids.
Many of the clips lim uses come from particularly large slash fandoms, like Star Trek, Due South, and Stargate: Atlantis, in which (mostly female) fans tell each other stories about the inferred gay relationships between the series' leads. It can be read as a commentary about what women are watching, what they can and can't see in mainstream media, and what their role as an viewer might be. If you look for images of women in the vid, you'll find that there are few, but the ones we see are revealing. The actual women we see in the vid are examining, analyzing, seeing, gazing, their thoughts unknown. Also present in the vid are caricatures of women as perceived by men and male-oriented media--garish, stereotypically feminine, hypersexual, and commercialized. Fandom, including slash media fandom, is a thriving, engaged, energetic remix culture, and that is the culture lim's vid celebrates. It is as much about the fandom as about the source, and it is for the fandom and for the art of remix that the vidder throws in her lot with the "pirates" in this piece. Kristina Busse's curator's note about the vid points out the way "Us" also interrogates the outsider's interest in fandom. Alexis Lothian, whose article in the latest issue of Cinema Journal examines "Us" and piracy, writes engagingly of her reaction to seeing this vid in a gallery exhibition in Riverside.
I want to make a brief note about vid culture, here--lim's vid is among the most famous, but vidding culture stretches back decades to the 70s (and even before) with the advent of the VCR, when women would tape episodes of Star Trek and painstakingly record vids of their favorite shows onto VHS tapes, which would be circulated privately among friends. The advent of digital video editing technologies allowed for much easier, higher quality remix vids with more sophisticated effects and cutting, and innovators in the vidding community continue to push the boundaries, learn, and collaborate on new technologies in the pursuit of their art. This culture predates widespread access to the internet and certainly predates YouTube by a number of years, yet it is often overlooked. For more information on the history of fannish vidding, I urge you to check out Francesca Coppa's article in Transformative Works and Cultures, Women, Star Trek, and early fannish vidding.
YouTube actually has a somewhat poor reputation among many vidders (though this is by no means universal). Content created within a particular context and using images in dialogue with particular community standards and expectations can go viral on YouTube, where it is stripped of that context and laid open for abuse from anonymous commenters. This famously happened with Killa's Star Trek Kirk/Spock vid, "Closer", set to the Nine Inch Nails song, which is a constructed reality vid that uses clips from the source to tell an alternative story--in this case, remixing the episode "Amok Time", in which Spock must return to Vulcan to consummate "pon farr", the biological need to mate, to ask the question, "what if they hadn't made it to Vulcan?" Within a fannish context, which accepts the premise of a Kirk/Spock relationship and takes it seriously, this vid is a disturbing commentary on implications of canon and becomes a visual essay examining and problematizing violence and rape. On YouTube, lacking that context, commenters considered it funny and bizarre. The vidder loses any control she might have had over the distribution of her work, which she may have only intended for a particular community. Henry Jenkins discusses this issue at length in his post "How to watch a fanvid". For another vid that celebrates female fannish engagement with Star Trek as a franchise, see jmtorres, nigaeli et al.'s The Long Spear, which begins with a meditative reflection on the new Star Trek reboot and becomes a meditation on fannish history, vidding history (many of the clips pay homage to early vids), female viewership, and the attachments between a source and its fans as well as the attachments fans form with one another.
YouTube is also unfavored by fannish vidders due to their somewhat extreme enforcement of copyright, which leaves little space for consideration that works might be valid fair use. Vidders are vulnerable to having their content pulled, or worse, can find themselves under threat of prosecution for copyright infringement. While fair use should protect remixed video, many sites are unwilling to risk culpability or legal expenses, and may not wish to anger advertisers with remixed content, and vids are pulled without warning or recourse for the vidder. This recently happened on a large scale when imeem, a site widely used by vidders for hosting and streaming their vids, suddenly pulled all of the vids off the site a few months ago, with something like 2 days' warning, leaving thousands of broken links around the internet and vidders at a loss as to where they should turn. Copyright infringement was not the justification for this--profit was. Imeem made no bones about how user-generated content (UGC) is not profitable. There was also no mechanism to download the work or save the conversations and feedback attached to the vids hosted on imeem. Currently, blip.tv and bam are in use, though many vidders have expressed that neither is satisfactory, and many are working to create embed functionality in their own websites as an alternative. That alternative, unfortunately, removes the very attraction of YouTube--the promise of a central, social space to share your creations.
There are valid concerns about the future on internet and especially the protection of user-generated content. Public Knowledge has an interesting post about what the video-driven future of the internet might look like, one which questions the dismissive attitude so many people have toward UGC. There's also the Organization for Transformative Works, which is a fan-run organization which advocates on behalf of fans and the legitimacy of transformative works, has provisions for legal support should it be necessary to defend a fan who chooses to protest on the terms of fair use. The OTW also owns its servers and is looking into eventually creating a site to host fanvids where creators do not have to fear being TOS'ed off their sites.