All posts tagged with 'jodi dean'
Blog Updates
Vanessa Meyer is a graduate of the Communications undergraduate program at Concordia University and is currently completing her final year in The New School Media Studies Masters program. Her work is fundamentally interdisciplinary in that she makes a conscious effort to bridge the field of critical media studies with other domains, such as philosophy, political science, cultural theory, sociology, and art criticism. Along with this academic project, Vanessa maintains the importance of integrating a strong practical element into her work. She is currently working on experimental ways of conceiving of and producing documentary.
A ‘Politics’ of Mapping, Or How to Produce a Whatever Documentary
What are the emerging politics of our new media environment? Is “politics” even the appropriate term to be using? It is not the goal of this paper to offer any simple solutions to these questions, or really any “solutions” at all, instead the present paper develops a (creative) way of understanding the developing political atmosphere from the perspective of an ever changing and fluid media landscape. Through an interdisciplinary approach it will follow in the footsteps of the thinkers that it draws on, such as Jodi Dean, Giorgio Agamben, Thacker and Galloway, Paolo Virno, Geert Lovink, and Deleuze and Guattari. By outlining the movement from the centralized televisual media landscape to the distributed network of the web this paper will combine Deleuzian theories of rhizomes and “mapping” with ideas for “new documentary” in order to create a creative and experimental way of working with both theory and practice- and subsequently gain a fuller insight into our developing “politics.”
John Drew is a video journalist and filmmaker who most recently co-directed the feature Border Stories and co-produced the multimedia website www.borderstories.org, which won last year’s Public Prize at the Every Human Has Rights Media Awards in Paris and was nominated as a finalist in the 2008 Online News Association’s Best in Video Journalism category. John is currently pursuing a masters degree in media studies at the New School in New York City.
The YouTube Assemblage: An emergent, banal and yet potent site of semi-conscious political and hegemonic contestation
During the month of November of 2009, more than 170 million U.S. internet users watched online video- nearly 31 billion videos in fact, of which 39% were viewed via YouTube.com . That is to say, more than 12 billion videos were watched on a single website in one month (94.3 videos per viewer) and Google, which paid $1.65 billion (in stock) for YouTube in 2006, is now trying to figure out how to monetize this situation.
YouTube represents nothing less than a socio-technological phenomenon that is now reshaping several industries- but what exactly has Google, arguably the world’s most successful company, purchased? Having launched and premiered its first video in February of 2005, YouTube now uploads twenty hours of video every minute and yet still hasn’t turned a profit. What does Google know about YouTube that we don’t?
Drawing from the work of Geert Lovink, Jodi Dean, Soenke Zehle, Ned Rossitier and Manuel DeLanda, this paper seeks to critically discuss the current socio-technical existence of YouTube and what this existence might spell for the future. More precisely, by considering Lovink and Dean’s respective analysis of network culture and blogging, I argue that the role of the camera and video technology within the world of YouTube necessitates nuanced consideration that both complicates and amplifies each of their conclusions about the social and the directions it is shifting. I then argue that it is only with an understanding of DeLanda’s assemblage theory that we may adequately assess YouTube’s socio-technical existence and consider how it is uniquely implicated in various, albeit transient, social and political arenas. Finally, by incorporating Zehle and Rossitier’s discussion of non-representational politics, I argue that YouTube is in fact its own assemblage that boasts great political power, which is already destabilizing and deterritorializing traditional sources of capitalist domination, such as copyright law.