This is where we’ll discuss Alexandra Juhasz, “Why Not (To) Teach On YouTube.” I don’t entirely agree with Juhasz, but I do think she has some interesting points that really have to be considered, especially in light of most of the stuff that I’ve seen which more or less praises the possibilities of YouTube.
I include Juhasz specifically for a couple of reasons. First, as she notes in her chapter, she actually taught a class about and on YouTube a few years ago, and she received a fair amount of press about it. I believe she made one of those lists that occasionally pop up in the popular media where people are flabbergasted that there is an actual college course about something.
Second, as she notes, her experiences with YouTube were not “great.” Now, I don’t completely agree that the only two extremes on YouTube are amateurish junk and commercialist pap for the masses, and I am not exactly “coming from” the same place in terms of critically reading media. I think it’s fair to say that Juhasz sees herself as a radical, avant garde, and activist filmmaker. I suspect she is as critical of most things in the mainstream media as she is with YouTube.
Still, she has a point. YouTube does seems to have a way of replicating popular culture in rather uncritical ways, and, given that it is owned by Google, it seems likely to me that the poor searchability of the site is on purpose.
I think this video of hers kind of shows a bit of what I mean here. On the one hand, I think it is kind of problematic in different ways; on the other, I think she’s making a pretty good commentary on the “reflectiveness” (narcissism?) inherent in a lot of YouTube videos, especially of the talking into the camera and/or around the house kind:
I agree with what Steve was saying above. While I don’t necessarily agree with Juhasz’s completely negative review of YouTube, I think she makes some good points about its deficiencies. I would like to hear a conversation between Wesch and her, to let them converse back and forth about their experience with the social media site and what they think it does/doesn’t bring to the classroom/culture.
My main problem with her was her attitude though. I don’t think she ever mentioned any positives, only slammed the site and the people who use it. Maybe that’s why she found that when the “classroom” was open to the public she was only getting a lot of negative comments from the YouTube population, maybe they sensed her antagonistic views.
If I remember, I’ll poke around on their web sites a bit because it seems to me that they did actually have a conversation about this stuff….
Kind of ironic that she bashes the use of YouTube when you consider that she’s using this medium for what she considers a positive end – making people think critically about YouTube. If she can use YouTube for a “positive” end, what makes her think that others can’t…?
To be honest, I’m not exactly sure what to say about this. Truthfully, I’m fighting the urge to kinda slam her for being so “above” all of this so-called amateurish, self-centeredness and commercialism that drives modern media and the youtube phenomenon. And, I certainly have my own criticisms of modern pop culture and commericalized mass media. And, I understand that she is attempting to be ironic/critical by replicating the “speaking into the camera” & “look at my house” kind of stuff that we often see. But, to be honest, and with all-due-respect, it comes off to me as being a bit self-righetous. Like Angie says, I think my main problem is the attitude. Does everything need to be high-art w/ a social conscience? Is there no room for a little mindless entertainment? Does everything need to be boiled down to a social value? I mean, I love and respect activism and avant garde art. But somtimes, I just need me some Weird Al Yankovich.
Can I simply say “ditto” to Dave’s comment here? I can respect what she is doing here, but it does come across self-righteous. Is that part of the statement, though? Is she saying that people take what they are saying way too seriously while providing generic, unrelated snapshots to the discussion? I think it would have been more meaningful/dramatic if she hadn’t opted to make fun(?) of the camcorder people. It was distracting to what was actually being said. Maybe that was the point?
Well I agree what everyone has said, but I just kept thinking that we all have our moments; something someone does or says drives us nuts and we go off on a self righteous tangent. I am not trying to play molly maid and clean up the mess for Juhasz, but I think her basing a class on youtube was to make several points, and maybe even one she was not able to acknowledge within herself. I gathered that her class was a failure and her reaction was to blame it on youtube’s structure.
Chaotic and disorganized as it may be, it gives people freedom and a awareness that was not easily visible before.
Give it time, the right people will assess what positive stuff youtube is exactly doing.
I think you’re basically right here, Renee. And as someone else says here someplace (Brian, maybe?) it’s messy, but that’s part of how she’s trying to make her point. In other words, she’s trying to use YouTube and this video (not to mention her teaching on YouTube) to critique it.
Also, keep in mind her critique is based in some pretty left-leaning Marxist/Feminists/activists theories of culture and film-making. So part of what people might be “resisting” here is more of that approach than the video itself.
Hmm… I understand Juhasz reaction to the industry of cinematography.
She sees youtube as an offspring of that industry and is angry that it seems to be male-dominated and representing cultural values that she doesn’t necessarily agree with.
This was an important piece but I don’t think her tone was effective.
I don’t think the world is ready for emotion. lol
I’m so glad it wasn’t just me! I kind of bashed her in my blog but wanted to seem more diplomatic in my response here
Dave, I think what you bring up about being “high-art” is really interesting. A lot of how we present ourselves depends on what we identify with. As Steve points out in his introduction, Juhasz wants to be seen as avant garde, and based on this video I agree with that statement. Now, that doesn’t necessarily make it bad, representing a “high-art” identity or whatever, as stereotypical as it might seem to someone like us, is actually still a minority public view, and it does strike up anger out in the general public, which usually motivates action, good or bad action, well, who knows?.
Anyway, I like to look at things from an identity perspective, because it can lead to some really good questions, such as: why do folks identity with certain things? what assumptions are they basing those identities on? What assumptions do the movements, causes someone chooses to align with say about their identity and those causes, movements themselves? i find this approach can be very useful when you have to deal with students that truly confuse you, and tend to get under your skin a little.
Agreed, Dave! Sure, it’s easy to “waste time” on YouTube, but YouTube is also a tool for connecting people and creating social change. In that way, it is productive. I was thinking over the break that we all need time away from the intensive academic life once in a while, because it too can become stall and unproductive–not to mention elitist.
Oh You’re funny Dave!
Youtube is fun.
But I cannot wait to read more anthropological studies on youtube.
And did anyone else spend 3:55 watching a girl eat a ham sandwich? Those videos are something else!
You know though, that’s very much in the sort of tradition of a lot of avant-garde filmmaking and art. I mean, I’ve seen stuff not unlike this in some rather famous museums….
I don’t know what there is about this video that so reminds me of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, but something does. (And they both killed themselves).
Is it possible she is really not as serious as she sounds? Could she just be playing the ‘devil’s advocate’ here?
Maybe it’s just me, but I have a hard time taking her seriously. I agree with Dave that she really seems to come across as self-righteous.
That’s funny… I thought the same thing! While I was watching it, I kept thinking to myself, “What is this… Sylvia Plath meets Valerie Solanas doing coffee shop poetry?” I kept waiting to hear fingers snapping and felt a sudden urge to wear a black turtle neck and beret
The dramatic cuts to dirty dishes in the sink and whatnot. And, as I said before, I realize that much of this was probably done in a slightly ironic, as you put it “devil’s advocate” kind of way… but it just wasn’t very effective for me. I’m sure that others might find it engaging… for me it was just distracting.
I am just wondering why in the world she thought a whole class based around doing work on youtube would be a good thing anyway. I guess for me working on only ONE genre for 14 weeks does not make any sense. I would get board and so I imagine my students would get board as well. It does not matter how much my students like the genre it becomes work and trite over time to do the same thing every week. I would get sick of looking at the videos over and over again. No wonder she felt overwhelmed she just got board. This video of hers is interesting but what is she doing here. I dont agree that there is really just mostly crap on youtube, I mean there is, but that is saying that there is nothing good either. I use many youtube videos in my classes becasue it is something that they can relate to. They need to see those things, but it is not the only thing to use. It seems to me she wanted to use them as vlogs and that didnt work the way she had planned so she is bashing youtube altogether, but that is not fair. Its like saying use wikipedia for research, does not go.
Well, keep two things in mind here, Cristin: first, she’s teaching film studies/video studies, so it perhaps makes a little more sense for her to do this than for us to hold a section of first year writing entirely online.
The other thing for me that I think her experience points out is actually more about her concepts of teaching and how a classroom should work. What I kind of see her (and to an extent her students) complaining about in her article is the lack of control and the disruption of the “teacherly” order of things. In other words, I kind of sense that one of the things that really bothered her (and again, possibly her students) is that this experiment disrupted the teacher-centered classroom.
Of course, in composition studies, the idea of disrupting the teacher-centered classroom is usually the goal…..
Just seemed like she wanted complete control and could not let some of that go. I know that teachers need to show students how to do the things they dont know how, but to just focus on one genre seemed odd to me i guess.
I was thinking that too Cristin. It did seem like a lot to base an entire course on just YouTube alone. I mean, I guess it made sense to me when Wesch did it because he seems like he had it all together and was looking at it from an anthropological perspective not from a pedagogical one. Maybe that’s the main difference. I felt like Wesch had a clear point and purpose and she wasn’t sure of hers.
Well, once again, I find myself in the position of having heard a manifesto/screed. I’ll admit, initially I typed out a good “Tube” style response filled with “LOLZ”. But, since then I took a deep breathe and decided to put on an egalitarian hat. And, yes, as the video suggests, while YouTube does create a sense of community, that community could be called false, inhuman. However, as with all manifesto type creations, I’m wondering where it’s going, what’s the solution, what’s the better alternative?
I prefer Welsch because it’s productive. And, at the same time, I am fully aware of how ridiculous, sexist, and un-examined a lot of the stuff on YouTube is. Thing is, I justify myself on something I think Juhasz will not easily contradict, people are people and if you exclude them (if you exclude yourself), they will not respond positively. Also, I imagine there are people on YouTube who are very aware their stuff is stupid and pretty much garbage and they are, as Welsch says, just joining in on the dance. Dancing is fun. One thing I know about dancing, in order to learn you’ve got to be OK with looking pretty silly for a long time.
Finally, to Judy, if Juhasz is kind of putting us on then my “Tube” response would totally have been on the mark. Also, about the reaction from embracing YouTube to having a bad experience, to not liking it at all, I agree, that’s kind of a knee-jerk, overreaction. We are better off finding useful ways to use technology, rather than taking an all or nothing approach. I’ll plug Steve’s “When Blogging Goes Bad” here, as it’s a good example of adjusting when things go off the rails, so to speak.
But I think we need to remember where Wesch is coming from. If you are looking at a culture, so to speak, from an anthropological view, then you don’t judge it as good or bad, but you simply look at is as an indicator, if you will, of the culture. And if you look at it that way, YouTube is now a part of our culture. It reflects what we value, and it perhaps enhances some of the things that we value. Maybe that is why I liked him. I didn’t get the idea that he was necessarily saying YouTube is good, but that ethnographically it is us, in a way–reflecting our bad, our good, our cheesy, what have you.
Well said, Judy.
Awesome point Judy. It is so difficult to look at something as an indicator when it is clearly pushing certain buttons, like an invasion on a empower-yourself- through-technology movement. Teachers, especially, will be the first to defend people that are empowering themselves that weren’t able to do so before hand.
But then what values are represented through the medium are disturbing to some. Since it is largely a visual medium, it will mirror what other values visual mediums represent (hollywood).
While at times I found myself disagreeing with or being put off by Juhasz, what she says about the lack of scaffolding on YouTube did resonate with me a lot. The numbers Wesch presents about the quantity of material on YouTube is pretty staggering: 200,000 videos uploaded every day! Juhasz suggests that YouTube should hire professional archivists to organize the content, and while this would certainly change the site, it would also provide the necessary infrastructure to make the site more usable and easily navigable, which seems essential to me.
I haven’t used Digg before, but it seems similar to YouTube in that it facilitates user-generated filtering. (I love all the user-generated tools Wesch talks about, by the way, and find them hugely democratic and exciting). In both cases, I guess I just worry about people who (a) maliciously tag/flag videos inappropriately, (b) don’t know how to tag effectively, and (c) don’t tag anything at all. Learning to categorize appropriately and highlight relevant material seems like an important rhetorical skill that would be worth teaching students in any course with a new media component, YouTube or otherwise. If sites like YouTube are going to remain user-run (for the most part — and I think they should be!) then YouTube needs to create more resources to help users invent/conform to appropriate infrastructures that facilitate organization and accessibility (similar to the Zen and the Art of Tweeting article in Prof Krause’s Delicious feed).
I do have one question: had YouTube rolled out of “annotate” feature by the time Juhasz taught her class and wrote this article? This tool seems like one that is very geared toward academic use of YouTube, though it is rarely used this way in the videos I’ve seen. It’s an often underexploited tool, I think.
Good point Carrie. I wanted to mention something about the annotation or comment section but I didn’t quite know what to say! I’ve been so busy that I have not been on youtube browsing for a while. LOL
About the annotation tool question– no, that is a relatively new feature. And I also would say that I think that YouTube has improved its search features a bit, though that may be just my impression not based on anything….
Juhasz is mirroring youtube and not filtering herself on purpose but I am not sure what kind of psychological manipulation she is trying to use. I don’t know if I like it. It’s too dense because of the content, the medium and genre.
I always get lost when people mirror on purpose. I don’t know why. I wish someone could enlighten me.
I guess the purpose of this approach is to make people hate it so much that they have to embrace it.
It’s highly complex.
I’ll come back to this one after I show it to some people. It is just really avante gard I guess.
I agree with Dave. It was hard for me to get into her. Isn’t that what the authority stuff is about giving people power to voice, create on the internet in different genres? I don’t know if I would teach a whole class on You Tube but I can see using as a genre for teaching. Sure it doesn’t have the professional stuff but it is like home movies made public. You have the choice to not to watch it. You can take that mouse anywhere you want.
All I can think about is how depressing it must have been to take her class–especially since she doesn’t seem to see many redeeming factors in YouTube, while teaching an entire class in it. I am surprised she offered to teach it when she knew so little about it in the first place. I am thinking it may have been better taught as a sociology class than an English class.