Online Video Archive - Reconsidered

After seeing a talk by Richard Pedersen of the Arts Institute at Bournemouth, I've decided to reconsider my position on YouTube as a superior media archive. With a lot of Web 2.0 sites (wikipedia and YouTube), whether or not they are "good" comes down to how we use them, which is, in part, contingent on how we refer to them. The fact that Wikipedia is compared to encyclopedias (which happens in part b/c of the "pedia" in its name) is good, b/c it helps people to understand that wikipedia is a starting point for research, just as encyclopedias are. Problems occur when people use wikipedia in lieu of scholarly journals, published books, or more substantial forms of established knowledge (which is what a lot of people are doing, unfortunately).

With YouTube, if it is viewed as a replacement for film and video archives, that's a problem. As Pedersen said in his talk, YouTube isn't backed up anywhere, videos come and go, the quality is awful (though I find it frustrating that those who attack YouTube use the term "poor quality" as if it were an objective assessment), and there are plenty of chopped up, fraudulent version of things floating around on it. Fine, its not an archive, and its completely inadequate for scholarly research. But so what? Does that mean its not going to be a part of the way the public at large learns more about its mediate past? If we use YouTube (or the pay per view archive taht may follow) the way we use Wikipedia, as a starting point, we're all going to know exponentially more about media than we do now. I can't help but suspect that part of the resistance towards collective archiving of media online isn't the same knee-jerk defensiveness that all experts feel towards Web 2.0. Let's define it as a different kind of knowledge, less perfect but more fluid, use it to benefit our cultures, and move on.

So what do we call this? Its not exactly an archive, and its not exactly a library. Maybe there's never been a name for something like this: an imperfect, expansive, fluctuating catalog of our collective mediated past (or, in the case of Wikipedia, our knowledge present). I suppose we need to stop looking to the past for metaphors, b/c they just get us into trouble. Better to begin to study the ways in which people use the information they get from these sites. The longer they're around, the more opportunity there will be to study this.

Online TV/Film Archiving - The Celestial Mulitplex

This is a response to a blog entry by Kristin Thompson, which was a response to A.O. Scott's article in the NYTimes about the promise of online film distribution and archiving.

The stumbling blocks, for Thompson, seem to be issues of fidelity and/or accuracy. User-generated archives like the vast library of TV shows and ads floating around on YouTube are often (or always, depending on your standards) of low quality, frequently mislabeled, and may be just clips of a longer original or may have a logo imprinted on them (either by the network that broadcast it or by the uploader). If online TV/film archiving works like wikipedia, then you would start off with a partial, mislabeled, low-quality bootleg of a TV show/movie/ad, then it would be corrected/replaced by another person, and then that one would be replaced by an HD version, until you had a copy which would be, in some cases, more true to the original than any well-funded archivist could possibly produce. We, the viewers, would have to make due with more inaccurate, partial, low-quality versions of these motion picture texts, but its better than the alternative: nothing. And it certainly wouldn't be surprising if the improvement of each text evolved at a rate akin to that of wikipedia.

Many experts still have trouble understanding why wikipedia isn't filled with inaccurate information, just as I'm sure many motion picture archivists cannot imagine an open, online archive that won't be filled with incomplete, mediocre copies of films. The debates around the accuracy of wikipedia continue, but I think its safe to say that wikipedia is better than nothing. That's the thing: wikipedia is "competing" with existing encyclopedias. What would the celestial multiplex be competing with? Netflix? Your local library? I'm not saying the online archive would be perfect, but its not hard to imagine it being far more comprehensive than any motion picture library the average citizen has access to. Is being a purist about obscure, out-of-date cinema really worth depriving most people access to millions of films?

Even the google book archiving project seems to miss the point of Web 2.0 (or 3.0, or whatever people are calling it). Experts have to let go of the idea of one person or a group of people being the arbiter(s) of the "truth" of an idea, or, by extension, a book or a film. If there is a site like wikipedia for motion pictures, the experts are free (and perhaps would have a duty) to upload their own pristine copies of films, and correct any misinformation that people have provided along with it.

But how would this work with copyright? Its not unthinkable that once videos are uploaded by users to the celestial multiplex, they can be claimed by their original copyright owners, but instead of being taken down by those owners, they would charge $ to let users view them. I think Google video has set up some sort of pay-per-view archiving of TV shows along these lines. If studios/copyright holders refuse to go along with this centralized, monetized system, one will evolve anyway (see: Napster, gnutella, bittorrent, YouTube, etc). Music labels smartened up by working out deals with ITunes. If motion picture copyright holders won't, then Bittorrent and YouTube (and whatever's next) are likely to pick up the slack. Again, people imagine that we'll either be consuming media in the traditional way, offline, or we'll get it free, illegally, online. Compromise becomes inevitable. ITunes and music labels have made it work. Why wouldn't this work for motion pictures?

These things are hard to predict, of course. I'm only saying that the celestial multiplex isn't as miraculous (nor as inevitable) as Thompson or Scott seem to think. Really, the two authors are writing at cross-purposes. Scott, like most of us, just wants to watch films to experience pleasurable emotions and learn more about life in general. Thompson is more concerned with cinematic artifacts. For scholars, sites like wikipedia or YouTube are insufficient. But that certainly doesn't mean that they aren't of some use to some people, and it doesn't mean (as Thompson suggests) that these sites won't continue to pop up, incorporating different types of information - words, music, films - in the future.