Our Abstract for the CASWE Conference

Title: Digitalizing Risk and Marginality: Social Work Knowledge Production through a Youth Lens.

Presenters: (all from the Factor Inwentash Faculty of Social Work, University of Toronto):

Rory Crath (PhD student)
Graham Watson (MSW student)
Adrienne Chambon (Professor)

Abstract:

Social work has always taken an interest in youth at the margins (as newcomer, as ‘deviant’). At present, the notion of ‘youth at risk’ encompasses diversely located youth (Swift & Callahan, 2009) who are deemed vulnerable but also disfranchised from civic participation. Of concern is whether social work interventions that focus on the troublesome characterization of youth may result in their further marginalization and stigmatization (Sharland, 2005; Kelly, 2001)? Do social work practitioners and scholars account for and build upon youth capacities, youth insights about their subjectivities (de Finney, 2007), and their investments in redefining the markers of a just society?

We propose that videos produced by youth within the context of social service programming designed to “give voice” to youth-at-risk are a rich source for practitioners to draw upon to inform practice strategies. We analyze a select sample of videos drawn from several arts-based social service initiatives in Toronto (one with queer identified youth, the other with youth living in one of the racialised and economically marginalised “priority neighborhoods”). The speed and combinatory possibilities of video technology, popularly employed in youth culture, permit youth a unique range of possibilities with which to engage with dominant representations of themselves. These videos reveal how youth mediate, buy-into, or subvert social and agency based discourses about risk and marginalization.

Our presentation addresses how images created by youth provide insight into the operations and negotiations of power within the communities in which youth live and expands our understandings of youth’s sense of belonging and desires to shape civic/public space. Funded by SSHRC, our project “Knowledge for Solidarity: A Critical Cultural Perspective for Social Work” focuses on how social work can benefit from approaches in cultural studies that operationalise use of contemporary technology and visual communication to facilitate subaltern worldviews.

Isabelle Kim Thesis Videos

As mentioned in my post on the Kim (2007) Thesis, there was a DVD component to her work that I was previously unable to obtain. I have since found copies available at the OISE library. They consist of a few short films produced by “youth,” primarily through the Queer Youth Digital Video Project for the InsideOut Festival. The DVD also includes a series of clips from interviews with youth involved in video-making projects, agency representatives who organize such projects and government officials who fund them. These interviews provide a myriad of different perspectives on the use, function and philosophies of YVPs.

The first series of clips deals with how the term “youth,” and more specifically, “at-risk youth” is defined by the different players involved in YVP production/consumption. Young people themselves saw the term “youth” as defining a period of self-discovery. Some thought “at-risk” was a limiting label, while others felt very comfortable defining themselves as at-risk. Agencies look at these terms in relation to their funding. People involved in video-making at an agency must fit, or be made to fit, within the concepts of “youth” and “at-risk” in order for a project to get off the ground. Finally, a City of Toronto rep defined youth as a developmental stage, and a stage where those at-risk are in need of the greatest level of support. She also mentioned that the specific definition of youth changes depending on which government body is “looking at them.”

The “space” in which youth videos can or do exist is also an important issue for Kim. In the DVD, the young artists seem more concerned with the actual physical conditions of production/editing of their work. Most saw the spaces they were given as being “makeshift.” In contrast, the importance of having an “inspirational,” open space, especially one that allows for a group to work comfortably, was mentioned by one young person. Agency and government representatives, however, look more at the spaces that the young people filmed, the spaces represented in their work. A Toronto Arts Council member mentioned how many new YVPs are making “needy” neighbourhoods and TCHC apartments more visible. He saw this as an attempt to “take back” these spaces. Both youth and adults interviewed felt the mobility of video allowed for a greater use and/or representation of space (or a greater marginalization of young artists forced to work in “some corner”).

The majority of the discussions on the DVD focus on the functions of video for the various people involved. One common “reason” for the production of youth video is for festivals. Youth and agency representatives both gave this as a motivation. Some felt that this incentive creates “product-driven” model, which creates a lot of pressure to produce high-quality work that fits within the ideology of the festival. A couple people from agencies spoke about a tension between personal expression and the politics of the agency/festival/product. One particular comment that caught my attention was one agency worker suggesting that overly personal work ran the risk of being cliché, while broader, more social approaches have more originality or resonance. I wonder if this dichotomy is worth investigating, especially when comparing more personal Youtube works to the more “political” agency-produces YVPs.

The audience for YVPs was also discussed. One interviewee felt that a key function of festivals for at-risk youth artwork was to ease the audience’s liberal sense of guilt by allowing them to feel like they have some level of experience/understanding of the at-risk artists’ hardships. I don’t know if I am so cynical about the process; however, I can understand the argument. Typical forums for viewing YVPs include local or international festivals, websites, public service announcements, etc. One of the most interesting points made on the DVD regarding audiences was that often there is a very minimal viewership. One agency rep even said she had never had a request from funders to see the work they financed. Youth, on the other hand, felt that government and policy makers would be some of the most important viewers of their videos.

Manovich and What New Media Is Not

“Video” is a problematic terminology in some respects, as it spans across two (or possibly more) quite disparate forms of media. The original meaning of the term, according to my computer’s little dictionary widget is “the system of recording, reproducing, or broadcasting moving visual images on or from video tape” (New Oxford American Dictionary Widget, 2005). Whether or not this concept, in and of itself, encompasses more than one medium is an interesting point to investigate. Is television a different medium from VHS video? Were VHS and Betamax different kinds of the same medium, or different media altogether?

These questions aside, there exists an even deeper rift within the concept of “video”: analog vs. digital. Today, for the most part, the term video refers to the latter. DVD, Blu-Ray, cellphone AVIs, Flash and streaming MPEGs from the internet are some of the mutations of this format (again, different or the same kinds of media?). As many know, this new format is composed/reproduced/transcribed in a series of binary numbers readable & transmissible on certain kinds of electronic devices (computers, PDAs, etc.). As opposed to the physical, tangible “tape” or “film” (usually magnetic or emulsion-based) used in analog recording, digital media use an invisible, ephemeral code to record and reproduce information.

Digital video is one of many formats that comprise what has come to be known as “the new media.” Other formats that are often classed as new media include digital photography, video games, Web content, software, digital animation and virtual reality (Manovich, 2001). As one might imagine, this is a very diverse group of formats and systems to be explained under one umbrella term. However, new media is still an important concept for us, as much of the theoretical writing out there engages with all of new media rather that digital video alone. There has certainly never been an equally developed theoretical school of video (analog and/or digital) as there has been for film. Even the work I have read on new media has not been nearly as rich or inspiring as much of the history of film theory. Perhaps this is due to the relative “newness” of this form of representation. Or perhaps there is something inherent in the format itself that precludes beautiful or richly engaged theory (in my opinion, the new media has yet to produce much art that I find engaged, contemplative or beautiful either). These are questions to explore elsewhere, however.

Looking at the format of representation itself is important to us, as what a medium allows or disallows, symbolises or silences plays a big role in how people use it to self-represent. It would be necessary, at the outset, to decide if our use of the term “video” refers only to digital video or if it includes older, analog formats. If we assume that digital video is our principle focus, then exploring conceptualizations of the new media would be useful.

Lev Manovich (2001) is one of the key theorists in the field of new media. He provides an interesting perspective on the term by dispelling certain “myths” of what is unique to new media. Here are those myths:

1. Analog media is continuous, new media is discrete
2. One has random access to digital media, that is one can access any part of the information equally fast
3. Digitization involves information loss (compression)
4. Digital media can be copied endlessly without changing/ degrading
5. New media allows for interaction of the user/viewer/consumer—interactivity.

He then proceeds to dispel these myths, as follows:

1. Analog film was also discrete, as motion pictures are broken up into 24ths of a second frames—they are not continuous
2. Early forms of cinema, such as loops of successive images also had a random-access nature to them
3. Photographic prints also have a limited amount of information available to the viewer, and the ever-increasing resolution of digital photos has surpassed these limits
4. Compression of digital media is often necessary for its reproduction (on the Web, on an iPod, etc.) so copying frequently does entail information loss
5. Many earlier forms of art, such as performance art, included the possibility of interactivity. Even paintings and films require the user/viewer’s contribution and interaction to make sense.

So if new media is not these things, what is it? Manovich defines it through 5 principles: numerical representation, modularity, automation, variability and transcoding. Numerical representation, of course, refers to the binary digits used to store, reproduce and represent information. New media can thus be described mathematically. Modularity refers to the many disparate & discrete “samples” that make up a new media product. A web page has many independent parts that comprise the whole, and many of these parts (hyperlinks, Flash videos, text, images) can exist and function on their own. Automation in new media is the ability of the computer itself to create and manipulate the information without the direct influence of a human being. Automatic generation of 3D objects in animation, “artificial intelligence” of video game characters and autoformat in Microsoft Word are all examples of this. Variablity refers to the capacity of new media to be reproduced in different forms. This can be seen in automated updates of software or lossy compression of video for the Web. The ease new media allows for “re-mixing” might also be considered a user-generated form of variability. Finally, transcoding is the way in which human generated and consumed data are translated into computer generated and consumed data. All new media thus has a two-fold language, a two-fold consumption and production and these two languages and materials influence each other constantly. This final principle is one of the most interesting in terms of how the medium of new media might shape the messages of youth digital video.

Hopefully we can use this definition of new media as a means to investigate youth video projects done in digital format and/or for the web. Most importantly, we need to look at how the nature of new media, its modularity, automation, variability and transcoding, allow or disallow, encourage or discourage certain forms of representation. We have already begun to discuss how agency mandates, social messages and popular culture affect the ways in which young people construct their identities on (digi)camera. How does the camera, the website, the editing software itself influence this self-representation?

A short talk on "Queer Realism" on YouTube

PART I


PART II


A really fascinating analysis of what is wrong with YouTube from a film theory (particularly queer film theory) perspective. Juhasz shows how the sheer volume and unruly nature of YouTube makes it nearly impossible for ideas of community, cause or theory to develop alongside the representations of "queer" culture through video. In my last post about YouTube, I showed the potential positive aspects of the informality, social (rather than political) focus of videos and lack of structure on the site. Juhasz has some interesting ideas about the negative side of these dynamics.

From Part II: "Without such theoretical bedrock, that is theory about form, queer realist practice on YouTube cannot take what is the most common second step for political film movements, namely as representation increases, those studying a movement quickly realise that expanded visibility is only the most preliminary of radical ambitions."

YouTube

Our current investigation of youth video projects (YVPs) has been primarily based on agency-produced videos, i.e. video work by youth that is funded, organized and often structured by social welfare, activist, artistic and/or educational institutions. The videos produced under these circumstances, more often than not, fall into the categories Kim (2007) describes in her thesis on YVPs: the festival model, the artist-in-residency model, the process-focussed model, or the message-focussed model (please see the Kim (2007) post for a more thorough explanation of these models). However, there is another important mode of youth video that often works from outside agency spaces--the “vlog.”

The term vlog is an amalgam of video and “blog” (blog is, in turn, an mash-up of “web log”). Therefore, one might imagine that a vlog is simply the addition of visual, auditory and temporal dimensions to the all-familiar blog. Blogs are primarily used as forums for public diaries, independent journalism or social commentary. Video blogs often present similar content. A boom, of sorts, in vlogging occurred in 2005, with the establishment of the Yahoo! Videoblogging Group and the creation of YouTube (Wikipedia, 2009). YouTube is unique compared to most personal, journalistic or social commentary vlogs, in that its overall content is quite diverse and unruly. YouTube media range from “pirated” television and music videos, to social and journalistic commentary, to community building/support groups, to silly, one-off performances of would-be comedians and daredevils. In this way, YouTube seems to offer a space of video production that is outside even the minimal formality of a typical vlog. For these reasons, I believe that YouTube offers one of the most unstructured forums for youth video production and consumption. It would, therefore, be a worthwhile endeavour to compare the ways that youth characterize themselves through video on YouTube to the ways that they self-represent within the often rigid and constricting mandates of agency YVPs.

This is not to say that YouTube provides a space of production that is without its own discursive limits and cultural norms. YouTube videos are not, necessarily, more “authentic” representations of young people. However, the norms and limits on YouTube seem to be established, for the most part, by youth themselves (although there is no shortage of community guidelines and terms of use to govern site content). There is also such a broad community on the site that it is relatively easy to navigate oneself into spaces that allow for different forms of expression, or to create one’s own (potentially “invisible”) space. Lange (2007) investigates these spaces of production in her ethnographic analysis of social networks on YouTube. She uses interviews with YouTube users and analyses of videos and user comments to outline structural models that have developed around a certain kind of YouTube video—the social networking video. For Lange, there are two major models for social network videos on YouTube: publicly private and privately public.

In publicly private videos, users “share private experiences...but do so in a ‘public way,’ by revealing personal identity information” (Lange, 2007, pg. 9). Privately public, on the other hand, is an attempt to connect with a broad audience through video “while being relatively private with regard to sharing identity information” (Lange, 2007, pg. 11). This can be accomplished by wearing masks or using alternate identities. Lange’s dichotomy of public vs. private could be an interesting framework to use in our exploration of youth video. What is allowed to be public information in an agency-sponsored YVP? What is kept private? How do the limits and norms around the public and the private differ between YVPs and YouTube vlogs? This may simply be another way of comparing the discursive practices of different forms of video-making.

An interesting example of the publicly private on YouTube is described in a 2007 article from The Advocate entitled Transtube. Transitioning youth have been found using the site to document their experience and educate and support others going through the various stages of a gender transformation. Tips are provided on hair removal, surgery, restroom etiquette and hormone therapy (Kennedy, 2007). Some trans youth have described YouTube as high-quality source of support and advice, making them feel “more confident and their worlds [feel] less frightening” (Kennedy, 2007, p. 19). “High quality” here refers more to useful information and social capital than to sophisticated production. These videos, like many “social networking” videos on YouTube, are often grainy, unedited and shot in informal locations, such as a messy bedroom. This lo-fi aesthetic is significantly different from many agency YVPs I have seen, which are often edited professionally or semi-professionally, shot in more formal, public spaces and boasting elaborate soundtracks and titling. Lange (2007) states that this level of technical sophistication is not a requirement for YouTube videos:

critics fail to understand that video quality is not necessarily the determining factor in terms of how videos affect social networks. Rather, creating and circulating video affectively enacts social relationships between those who make and those who view videos (p. 8).

Is this technical/aesthetic divide one of the principle differences between agency YVPs and vlog media? If agencies encourage videos that emphasize politics and productivity while YouTube spawns work that is primarily social, can we relate these functional differences to material/aesthetic differences? Does hi-fi = political/productive and lo-fi = social? I believe that this potential dichotomy is an important one when looking at youth video. The embracing of the grainy, informal aesthetic on YouTube may be one way that youth are subverting Fleetwood’s (2005) cycle of representation.

Little Details

The Youth Video blog now has a separate section for both references and search histories used in our research. Links to these pages can be found at the top right hand corner in a gray box titled "References and Search Histories." Please click on the "references" or "search history" links below to view the respective documents.

All references related to previous posts have been added already, while new information can be updated with additional postings. This way references and search histories do not need to be included in separate blog posts, but will be amalgamated on their own static pages. APA format will be used. Any studies, books, videos or other media mentioned or linked to in a blog post will have a corresponding reference on the reference page under the author's name or other identifying information.

Hyperlinks to actual documents/media will still be included in the blog text as much as possible.

Hear the Story in the Electronic Age

I’m trying something new with this post as I have come across two interesting resources and would like to incorporate them both in my discussion. The first is an old interview with Jean Baudrillard that I have re-discovered during my investigations into youth and new media. The interview was aired on France’s La Sept in 1988 and is titled “The Work of Art in the Electronic Age.” I read a translation of the interview in a book of Baudrillard interviews called Baudrillard Live. The second is a video project produced by ten Torontonians between the ages of 16 and 25. The video, Hear the Story, was funded through the City of Toronto’s “Community Safety Plan” in 2005. It focuses on the lives of 3 participants and is intended to spark discussion about diversity, inclusion and community safety for young people of colour in Toronto. I would like to take Baudrillard’s discussion and analysis of contemporary art in a media-saturated world and apply it to Hear the Story. The incorporation of these two works has no particular rationale other than my discovery of them at approximately the same time, and so their cross-analysis may seem a little forced. Nonetheless, it will hopefully open up new ways of looking at youth video projects.

I know very little of Baudrillard’s work, in fact, I think this brief interview is all I have read. I found it a few years ago when working on a video project of my own—I was researching "art histories" for the medium of video. Although it is over 20 years old, his discussions of how our current culture is saturated with media (with “screens”) is ever the more relevant today. Baudrillard references both Marshall McLulan and Walter Benjamin is his discussion. From McLulan he takes the idea of “the medium is the message” to its logical end—that is there is no longer a message, no longer a content to communication beyond the proliferation of images and screens. He believes that “events, politics, history, from the moment where they only exist as broadcasts by the media and proliferate...their own reality disappears. In the extreme case the event could just as well not have taken place” (p. 146). The medium is all that is left of communication. From Benjamin, Baudrillard references the idea of an “aura” around a work of art, and how this aura is no longer possible. Benjamin thought of an aura as some kind of sensible by-product of a work’s authenticity and singularity. The fact that the painter’s hand could be seen in a painting, that a painting was a singular creation by an artist, gave it a kind of mystical charm. With the advent of photography and “mechanical reproduction” of artwork, according to Benjamin, this aura of authenticity was lost (although, to him, this was not necessarily a bad thing). Baudrillard seems to have a less transcendent view of the aura, however. He describes the singularity of art as stemming from its ability to make us stop, to make us contemplate. Now, with the advent of video, television (and soon after the internet), this contemplation, this stopping, is impossible. All human production and consumption is now subservient to the proliferation of superficial forms of media. He does not seem to share, however, in Benjamin's view that this lack of "aura" could have a positive, democratizing impact on cultural objects and cultural production.

So how can we look at Hear the Story within the framework of Baudrillard’s critique of new media? I must admit that I am somewhat reluctant to do so, as I feel like Baudrillard presents a very cynical portrait of art in the postmodern world, and I don’t want to spend this post tearing apart a sincere attempt by youth to create dialogue about very real issues in their lives. Hopefully, instead, the video work will serve to undermine Baudrillard’s cynicism in some respects.

To begin with, the very first scene of Hear the Story does have a very arresting, very contemplative nature to it. Their is a definite vibe of guerrilla cinema as the cameraperson captures an angle of a news broadcast that was not intended by the broadcasters. This shot undermines the polished nature of a typical news clip about troubled youth simply by offering a physically different perspective. The shot ends on a young black face as the reporter’s diatribe fades off into the background. This stopped me, this felt like a very anti-Baudrillardian moment. A real human being popped out from the screen and made himself visible in contrast to the simulacra of the reporter.

There are other moments in Hear the Story that seem to step outside of what Baudrillard calls the “circuit” of mass media. Steve’s story, in particular, has an arresting quality to it. The director of this segment narrator begins by discussing the images of racialized youth in popular culture, and how a lack of positive, or at the very least complex, depictions of people of colour do not exist in the media. Even BET is implicated in this stereotyping of young black males. However, the filmmaking, as well as Steve’s eccentric character, offer us something else—another image of an “at-risk” black youth. I sincerely believe that this is a break in the circuit, that these youth wanted to offer up another image, a singular and “authentic” image, and they were successful.

There is some level on which I do support Baudrillard’s cynicism, however. Although I do believe that this video offers some brief, sincere and contemplative moments, its place among all the other images and screens in our culture is extremely subjugated. Who will see this work? Are the dozens of employers refusing to call Ingrid for an interview ever going to be exposed to these richer images of youth? Is John N.’s call for action in the finale going to fall on deaf ears? It is particularly disturbing that the video, which exposes the economic exclusion of racialized youth in Toronto, is funded in part by Ontario Works. It is hard to imagine that these youth stories, back in 2005, led to any radical policy changes in the OW program. Is this video, for them, simply another screen? Does the reality of these stories disappear behind the medium, the project, the “youth activity”? Will policy bureaucrats stop and contemplate?

REFERENCES
-Benjamin, W. (1935). The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. The Art History Archive. Retrieved Oct. 3, 2009 from http://www.arthistoryarchive.com/arthistory/modern/The-Work-of-Art-in-the-Age-of-Mechanical-Reproduction.html
-Duke A., et al. (2005). Hear the Story (video). Toronto: Youth Documentary Training Project. Retrieved Sept. 30, 2009 from http://www.toronto.ca/community_safety/video/20060912hearthestory.wmv
-Gane, M. (1993). Baudrillard Live: Selected Interviews. Taylor & Francis. Retrieved Oct. 3, 2009, from http://lib.myilibrary.com.myaccess.library. utoronto.ca/Browse/open.asp?ID=4603&loc=iii
-"The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (2009, September 27). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 14:43, Oct. 3, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Work_of_Art_in_the_Age_of_Mechanical_Reproduction&oldid=316567490