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.
No comments:
Post a Comment