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