<videovortex> blogreport vv 5: politics of online video

[Geert Lovink]

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.