Mass Media Belongs to the Masses

The character of mass media has been shifting dramatically over the past century- from the one-directional consumption of television, to the dialogical (yet niche) nature of online bulletin boards, to the enormous multimedia production of today. As the tools of new media increase in accessibility and expand in ubiquity, we find ourselves in conversation with a public audience that is more or less evident.

Knowing who one's audience is can be a tricky process. Blogs, websites, and publicly-accessible online profiles entail invisible publics. The creation of Friend Lists and the implementation of privacy features restricts one's audience and enhances awareness of it. Through the lens of the social graph, we can create categorical definitions of our audiences by labeling clusters of relations.

(From the looks of it, it would appear that my social network revolves around the following sites: Wesleyan, Boston, NY, San Francisco, Washington D.C, and the Northwest US):



There is something intrinsically satisfying in visual representation that text lacks. There are also few things more desirable than that which reflects oneself, however iconically.

TouchGraph, the company behind this Facebook application, says on their website:

"Traditional search engines provide a way to sift through this data. However, the greatest insights can be achieved not by sifting, but by looking at the big picture to see how items are connected."

Just the name of the company- TouchGraph, beckons us outside of the textuality of the Internet (a quality that is becoming progressively less prominent), allowing us to grasp our wider place in the virtual world on a more intuitive level.

Such data also allows us to understand exactly how limited our individual, direct scope actually is. I predict that the practice of mirroring real-life social networks will soon become secondary to the process of producing engaging media- which, as the Internet becomes increasingly searchable, will find its place amongst wider taste fabrics. These "taste fabrics" are constructed through "word of mouth" reconfigured to the modern sense- that is, hyperlinked. In turn we may find ourselves navigating visual representations of the taste fabrics we create through our Google searches, our social networks, and our own content.

Emancipation from the material bases of inverted truth this is what the self-emancipation of our epoch consists of. This "historical mission of installing truth in the world" cannot be accomplished either by the isolated individual, or by the atomized crowd subjected to manipulation, but now as ever by the class which is able to effect the dissolution of all classes by bringing all power into the dealienating form of realized democracy, the Council, in which practical theory controls itself and sees its own action. This is possible only where individuals are "directly linked to universal history"; only where dialogue arms itself to make its own conditions victorious.
-Guy Debord

Full Circle? From the Lumiere Brothers to YouTube

In what are considered the first anthropological films, the Lumiere brothers captured the daily lives of ordinary individuals in society. In light of the novelty of the technology at this time, however, these films were later criticized as spectacles of self-conscious humanity. The field of anthropology began to lean ever more toward lexical ethnographic data collection and presentation, as the genre of filmmaking diverged toward the technical and imaginative processes of the filmmakers themselves. Today, both the technologies involved in making visual ethnographies as well as the publication of such documentation are readily available to anyone in possession of a camera and a computer. Such a trend begs one to examine the following: In what ways are anthropology and film converging in this era of interactive technologies?

Little more than two years old, YouTube (whose motto is “Broadcast Yourself”.) has fast become one of the most popular sites on the web. Users can create accounts in order to share videos with friends, comment on the videos of others, save favorite clips, and create playlists. Unlike television, YouTube is a fully interactive medium. The service is free of charge, allowing anyone to view videos generated from around the world and engage in discourse with other viewers. The Internet is truly a point of liminality, that space in between ephemeral experience and the social structure- that which is without structure itself but works to create it.

Anthropology as a discipline is dependent upon claims to expertise. However, there has been “an increasing recognition that ethnographic understanding involves a process, and that it is mediated through subjective exchange (Grimshaw 170).” One could find no better way of describing the YouTube community in anthropological terms. What film lacks in depth of lexical discussion, YouTube makes up for in the sheer quantity and variety of subjective understandings available. Its tendency to depict life informally recalls the fundamental nature of ethnography itself, though it is not without a fair share of self-consciousness.

A central tenet of applied anthropology in particular is depicting the issues faced by subordinate peoples. Anna Grimshaw discusses one of the major flaws of anthropology- its specialized, inaccessible nature does little to promote public visibility of issues such as human rights, oppression, and war. The work of Llewelyn-Davies in televising her documentary fieldwork with the Maasai women, informal in nature, seems a proper precedent for the emergence of ethnographic video on the Internet. Drawing on feminist practices of giving voice to the oppressed, the Internet has become a virtual arena for the politically concerned. A quick search of YouTube with the term “Baghdad” yielded 2,490 video clips. Television and Internet mediums share the power of evoking embodied viewing by the audience, who are able to engage with the subjects from the comfort of their own homes.

In light of the current postmodern trend in anthropological thought, a discussion of the reflexive and discursive nature of YouTube is also warranted. These elements are exemplified in a short clip by a Michigan State University student, who asked the question “why do you tube?” His question generated 364 video responses from members of the YouTube community, many of whom described the allure of acquiring insight into the lives of people different from their own, a shining example of globalization in practice. It is this element, as well as YouTube’s capacity to evoke public engagement with ethnographic film, that I seek to explore further in an extended work.