Digital Literacies

Have been having a bit of fun looking around YouTube,
finding memes and stuff.

If a meme finds its way online or even
begins life on the web, it usually ends up moving into other types of space and
maybe back again.

here is some of the work from the clan du neon … campaigning to save the environment by
turning off display lights in shops … it looks fun!

So the meme exists partly online as
part of the whole clan du neon process involves filming the process of switching
off lights and to make the video available through YouTube.

You can see
more on this blog here. Or
on YouTube here.

Rosa told me about some other memes and we had fun looking up all
sorts of things … such as the WonderWoman copycats. Jen Gray is Grrrreat:

I dunno where she learned those
moves. But wow.

There are more related videos here.

So what else?

There is the Pedro dance. It all began with the film Napolon Dynamite with this dance here.

It has all become a bit of an Internet occupation to mimic the dance and to put on’es own spin on it. See for example here:

But I like the ones which jam together several ideas like the ipod version:

There is this other stuff going on too .. around the controversial ‘don’t tase me bro’ news story set in the University of Florida. Basically a university student was marched away from the floor when he was trying to ask Senator John Kerry some embarrassing questions. It has become quite a well watched incident on YouTube since the whole dreadful event was videoed.

There have been copycat uses of the line ‘don’t tase me bro’ which tend to be used as a way of signifying the USA as a police state. Sometimes to comic effect (depending on your viewpoint)

15 Seconds Of Fame

I wonder what you think of the ethics of films like this.

This time have a look on a different video sharing site. Here we can take a look at Britney Spears using ‘don’t tase me bro’ as a line in a song. Nice.

So, a lot of mixing and jamming here. Interesting in terms of literacy, shared and distributed authorship.

What of its significance to learning -

that the Internet promotes the sharing of ideas and the dispersal of information. That we can use and re-use and reformulate. That the power of texts can be increased and weakened through duplication.

Points of discussion:

1. Where do we draw the line in terms of ethical use of video material for parody?
2. Are political messages strengthened or weakened through their proliferation and adoption by online groups?

I like the idea of applying questions to texts such as:

What is the main message or content of this text?
What is the purpose/function of the text?
What media are used to convey the text?
Are these the most appropriate modes and media for the conveyance of the
text message?
Who benefits from this text? (e.g does anyone make money?)
What messages are prioritised and which information is undermined or
omitted? (Why?)
Does anyone suffer as the result of this text?

we can apply these questions to any text and we can teach kids to ask them. And for some texts we can also ask:

Why is this text so popular/unpopular?
Why do people want to mimic this text?
How do the original meanings and beneficiaries (etc) change as a
result of this text becoming a meme?

But …. Why would you want to do all this?
The answer is simple. Because in order to become literate,we need to understand social implications of texts as they are part of the whole meaning.

Today I had a go at playing Supple!! Thanks to PJC my life will never be the same again. It’s a bit like the Sims – but sexier. So that’s the game for me, obviously.

Bell Hooks is on YouTube:

some people mihght find that unexpercted, that intellectuals have stuff on YouTUbe.

But a lot of really good stuff in on there.

This video is a clip from a lomger video available from the Media Education Foundation

BUt you can check out quite a lot of stuff on YouTUbe from the Challenging Media section.

Rosa likes the stuff about advertising and the exploitation of women. Like this:

So, loadsa stuff about ISSUES on YouTube. You just have to know how to find it, I guess.

And I have used quite a lot of them on the New Literacies MA … maybe I will soon put up videos of my own onto YouTube.

seems that nearly a month has gone by since my last post…. in the meantime I have had a makeover.

here’s me out on my bike:

As I was making this video so that you can see what I look like now, all these creatures started following me.

I would go for Yoghourt everytime:

I love the rough-cut film culture; this seedy side of life thing that YouTubers seem to do so well. It is like a ritual resistance performance which is anti- hollywood / anti glam/ anti sophistication.

A lot of online humour is self parodying and understated. But I also like this film as it has a bike in it and bikes are the NEW THING as far as I am concerned.

I also love the joke people were having on Flickr with this photo here

The comments made me fall about laughing. I just lurve hanging with the kids online.

And just randomly … this was in my kitchen sink:

Just an example of how the internet has changed people’s lives … you cannot tell me they would have done this without planning to put it on YouTube first.

People lead more interesting lives through what they do online as well as what they do in order to report it / show it online.

Anyway, regarding this video, I love the way the drama challenges the space and the rituals of the London tube.

So this is a series filmed by three Iraqi twenty somethings in Baghdad. The films have been edited and produced by a US based company – targetting their films at a young US based audience. Distributed on the Internet it is a part of the new generation of citizenship type journalism that is now really proliferating as more and more people are gaining access to technology. Here is one of the men opening his new camera.

The Iraquis all speak English with an American accent. I assume they were selected out of the many who applied to be involved in the films, partly because of their excellent English and partly for their accents – which no doubt would give them a ‘just like us’ appeal for the target US audience. But at times the American accent seems ironic in the face of the sometimes anti-American comments the participants make.

Suffice to say, that not many Iraquis are really gonna be able to watch this stuff since few have computers, fewer have the Internet, and less still have Broadband, – and even then it takes hours to watch a two minute snippet (apparently.)

Distributed across more than one site, the primary home for these short episodes seems to be the blog, but each film is hosted by YouTube and it is really interesting to see the comments ther, under each episode. Some of them are unbelievably cynical . Many are very anti Muslim or anti Iraq comments. Many are empathetic to the Iraqui situation.

I was interested in how a comment on one of the films a comment refers to how YouTube keeps re-setting the number of comments:

timsmedia (2 hours ago)
the view count and comments on this vid have been reset AGAIN!!!!! obviously youtube are under orders not to let this video get too popular as its a nuisance to the American military-industrial complex.

At the time of copying this comment and writing this post there were only 23 comments and just over a thousand views. The last time I looked (last week) there had indeed been over two hundred comments and over 4,000 views.

The 36th out of the 38 films shows the dentist Saif’s fiancee leaving Baghdad. Despite being a qualified dentist, he has not been given his cerrtificate in order to prevent him leaving. He considers giving up his career to save his sanity.

Having moaned in my last post about the number of emails I get, this morning I was unable to open any of my emails due to a “hardware problem” at work.

Incredible.

I had no idea how to start work without it. I was totally incapacitated. All my work was online – hidden away as attachments to emails. Maybe I will never moan again about having so many emails… no don’t think so.

When it did get going, I found I had been sent a link to this wonderful creation on Youtube:

An interesting take on the mash up where classic paintings of women have been digitised and allowed to dissolve one into another. I guess it reflects similarities and differences about women across the ages.

I receive increasing numbers of emails which contain links to YouTube and it is certainly a site which has become a household name. It is embedded into everyday life in a manner which no longer is associated with exotic or advanced ICT practices. Perhaps this is an example of ‘blackboxing’; a term associated with Black Box Theory – which I was introduced to by Mary P and Jennifer Rowsell.

In the meantime, I suppose I need to be more circumspect when I use terms like ‘everyday life’ … whose ‘everyday life’ do I mean? Nesta Futurelab has a report about Digital Divides which they say are increasing. Some people’s everyday lives allow them no access to technology at all.
It is arguably the role of policy makers and education practitioners to to provide opportunities for everyone to access new technologies and use them in ways that are relevant to their lives.

The futurelab is in Bristol, so while we are down there (here?) let me show you some streetart from there:

This is from the StokesCroft area and even though this art is on the street, it has a frame around it as if hanging in somebody’s house. Nice juxtaposition here taking style from one space and putting it in another. The work has been created by local people trying to re-claim the area and do it up in the way they want. It is as if they are saying’ this is our home’. It is a kind of streeet art mashup of genres. (It is not just in technology that grass roots level creativity plays with boundaries and moves things around to express new ideas.)