What has struck me about YouTube since I started to use it was that this relatively new medium was quickly received by an audience that not only accepted video as a means of transmission, but YouTube as a subsection of digital media that has its own aesthetic and cultural diction, just like film and TV. I’m tempted to attribute this nonchalant acceptance to the media saturated world that we live in already, that something like YouTube would be considered part of a natural progression and accepted as such, instead of being considered a digital novelty item. In addition to WebCam videos, which are pretty direct in their operation, YouTube also hosts animations and videos that are edited by non-professionals. And because of copyright issues that YouTube (Google purchase), videos produced professionally (usually for TV or film screening) are fleeting and illegal files and usually unreliable in quality. The left over videos, made by “amateurs” are usually homemade, that is, made with a relatively low cost camera and low cost graphics/simple editing if any.
Stretching this conception of these videos as homemade, I think it would be appropriate to address YouTube as a platform for folk art, and the videos as folk art objects. According to Wikipedia, folk art is “a wide range of objects that reflect the craft traditions, and traditional social values, or various social groups. Folk artis generally produced by people who have little or no academic artistic training and use established techniques and styles of a particular region or culture.” Here’s how I read this definition: the object referred to is the YouTube video, whether this video is an “original” (produced by the person who posted it) or an appropriation (i.e. ripped from TV, film, website, DVD, etc.). I’m aware that this definition implies a history of this craft within the social/cultural group that employs it in folk art, but if 50 years is the amount of time something moves from being ‘modern’ to ‘historical,’ and if I’m taking a class right now discussing in great detail the history of photography/film (which the format of YouTube videos follows, that is, the classic editing of film) then these videos do in fact “reflect traditional social values.” American social values do lie with the photographic image as something that embodies a specific moment in time, taken from a specific point, both as aesthetic and scientific instrument. Ok, maybe I’m getting a bit theoretical, so I’ll move onto M dot Strange.
This article not only focuses on the audience he wrangled via YouTube, and the support that implies (but doesn’t necessitate), but that now M dot Strange is using YouTube as a platform for his own film school teachings. Staying with my folk art theory above, this could be seen as a gesture to pass on his own method to this folk art platform. Teaching his own style of the craft.
An interesting question raised by this argument is “what culture or social group does this folk art represent?” I’m aware with the term Global Village, and I shy away from it for this argument because it seems an easy way to generalize the interactions facilitated by the Internet. Perhaps this folk art represents a social/cultural group not based geographically but on a more personal level, such as personality qualities or sense of humor or interests that can stretch in meaning as these videos are transmitted beyond their concept. Wow, this is long. Anybody read it and have any ideas?
And, short bio: Art:Sem concentrator, senior. My interests wax and wan, right now I'm really interested in YouTube, traveling to SE Asia, classic Westerns, and video and digital media. I'm from Los Angeles.