Politics of online video
Saturday, November 21, 2009
By Geert Lovink
In his presentation the Glasgow-based Simon Yuill took us back to the 1980s and the media activism back then: films and videos produced during the miners strike and other riots and actions. This activity in the late 1990s transforms in ‘citizen journalism’. Yuill here used the example of the Cluetrain Manifesto (1999). The emphasis here is on distributed conversations. It is the RSS feed that becomes the organizing principle of distributed realtime news production. This tool can be used by anyone and is not own or controlled by states and corporations. With Toni Negri one could say that APIs are becoming ‘constitutional machines’. Yuill calls for ‘critical constitutions’ in order to prevent the use of closed and proprietary platforms by activists. The was no ‘twitter revolutions’ that came out of street in Iran. It was mainly users overseas, in other countries, that caused this hype.
Elizabeth Losh started with a montage of Barack Obama’s YouTube performances. In the talk called ‘Official Channels’ she discussed the different trends that emerge. YouTube is more state-like, and national then we often might think. How is online video used to maintain the status quo? Online video is fully integrated in the White House media strategy. The media apparatus is often shown explicitly, which Losh is calling ‘mediated transparency’. Obama is put in the role of the leader that explains. Obviously Obama is not the first US president to use media techniques. Liz mentioned elements from Bush, Reagan, Roosevelt, Kennedy, and so on.
How much ‘change’ do we really have? In the White House Obama has been removed from the computer. Liz was able to find only one picture in which Obama holds his encrypted top-secret Blackberry. Most often we see him on the phone. The realm of the computer is left to the female secretaries outside of the Oval Office. An irony of Obama’s online video policy is that most schools in the USA block YouTube, in order to Then Liz Losh addressed the issues of the White House’s dependency on Google/YouTube. Most of you will know about the important role of Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt’s role as a senior political advisor of this administration (more related interview video footage on vectorsdev.usc.edu/nehvectors/losh.
Stephen Crocker from Newfoundland, Canada, started with 1960s film footage of Fogo Island. The question then was not so much to represent people’s lives but how to ‘create people’. How to overcome the problem of ‘remoteness’? One of the solutions at the time was the resettlements of thousands of people to larger growth centres. The problem was defined as one of communication, ‘information poverty’ as it was called. Information was supposed to tell us something about human nature, and was associated by Marshall McLuhan and others as ‘metaphysics’. For remote communities the origin of a film remained mysterious. The National Film Board had the task to change this. ‘The Things I Cannot Change’ from 1967 for the first time explained the situation of poverty to a wider audience. From now on films did not have to be about the poor, but had to involve them, and had to be produced by them. Films about social change were screened to the people themselves. These days there is no collective public space anymore. What online video tools do is enable self-reflection. It is confessional and self-referential amateur material. Video sharing is addressed to anyone but no one in particular. With Lacan we could say that these images are both inadequate and compelling. Intimacy is created, and not destroyed, by bureaucratic machines. How can we be with others in this new world of remoteness and loneliness? The ways of being together are different these days. The way we relate to others is through the image.