(Via Bruce Sterling’s Wired blog)

Tom Sherman on vernacular video:

Video as a technology is forty years old. It is an offshoot of television, developed in the 1930s and a technology that has been in our homes for nearly sixty years. Television began as a centralized, one-to-many broadcast medium. Television’s centrality was splintered as cable and satellite distribution systems and vertical, specialized programming sources fragmented television’s audience.

As video technology spun off from television, the mission was clearly one of complete decentralization. Forty years later, video technology is everywhere. Video is now a medium unto itself, a completely decentralized digital, electronic audio-visual technology of tremendous utility and power. Video gear is portable, increasingly impressive in its performance, and it still packs the wallop of instant replay. As Marshall McLuhan said, the instant replay was the greatest invention of the twentieth century.

Video in 2007 is not the exclusive medium of technicians or specialists or journalists or artists–it is the peoples’ medium. The potential of video as a decentralized communications tool for the masses has been realized, and the twenty-first century will be remembered as the video age.

Surveillance and counter-surveillance aside, video is the vernacular form of the era–it is the common and everyday way that people communicate. Video is the way people place themselves at events and describe what happened. In existential terms, video has become everyperson’s POV (point of view). It is an instrument for framing existence and identity. There are currently camcorders in twenty per cent of households in North America.

Jenkins noted that the success of Youtube as a business owes as much to amateur contributors like the Chinese Backstreet Boys as it does to the founders — the value of a user-generated content business depends precisely on the popularity, if not the production quality, of content generated by users, and the willingness of these prosumers to alert their social networks to new cultural discoveries.

Then he moved on to “the basic premises of convergence culture.”

1. “Convergence culture is a cultural rather than a technological process.”

The flow of stories, ideas, information, communities, brands, intellectual properties across media platforms has created new forms of “transmedia entertainment.” For example, to get all the clues and puzzle pieces to see the whole story and undergo the full Matrix experience, you need to see the Matrix movies, play the game, participate in the online discussions, read the comics.

It is not the “digital revolution” in the sense of a withering away of the mass media regime in the face of grassroots, peer to peer, vernacular media. The concentration of ownership of large media companies is as great as ever. But the media environment has changed radically from the days when mass media was the only choice. Top-down and bottom-up media co-exist in corporate boardrooms and teenagers’ bedrooms. Convergence culture, as Jenkins sees it, is “an ever more complex ecology of media cultures.” Mass media is still the biggest organism, but it is no longer the only species, and as digital media make new forms of cultural production, appropriation, re-interpretation possible, the properties of the system become as interesting as the properties of the biggest organism.

Jenkins cited Ithiel de Sola Pool as an important foundation for his own ideas about “the perpetual process of convergence and divergence, the dynamic churn of culture.” As examples of convergence coexisting with divergence, Jenkins pointed to the video iPod — “a dramatic shift of how television relates to consumers” — and to the mobilization online of fan communities to protest the cancellation of Stargate by the Sci-Fi channel.

(to be continued…)

Adrienne Russell, Mizuko Ito, Henry Jenkins, Howard Rheingold, at USC Annenberg Center — photo by Justin Hall.

Henry Jenkins was the guest lecturer for the DIY Media seminar at the Annenberg Center for Communication on January 17. Jenkins is Director of the Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT and the author and/or editor of nine books on various aspects of media and popular culture, including a central focus on DIY media as part of the larger flow he calls participatory culture. His newest books include Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide and Fans, Bloggers and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture.

The title of Jenkins’ presentation and the theme of the ensuing conversation at ACC was “From YouTube to Youniversity: Learning and Playing in an age of Participative Culture”

Jenkins, whose online autobiography has a comment thread, walks the convergence culture talk he talks; he started his ACC presentation by alluding to the cover stories of Business Week on “The Power of Us,” Newsweek on “Putting the We in the Web,” and Time on “YOU are the person of the year.”

Jenkins then cited the Web 2.0 phenomena as an enabler of participatory media, “a resurgence of new companies and a period of economic churn associated with user-created content,” then mashes up the pop culture references with Yochai Benkler’s remarks on non-market and non-proprietary production: “we do well to complicate our models” of how and why humans organize cultural production. All this led up to his fundamental assertion, that “YouTube is the fullest embodiment of convergence culture.” Jenkins offered the explosion of vernacular digital video online as an example of the strong connection between popular culture media and pedagogical practices he has written about for years.

Two points in particular are evidenced by Youtube’s success: “Amateur content is getting global visibility. And fan communities are not just distribution channels, ” but the seedbeds of cultural creation, Jenkins stated, in a kind of “ecological relationship with blogs and grassroots communities that create cultural material and social networks that distribute it.” Examples: The deaf community using video of american sign language; people invade Walmart, use the equipment on the shelves to create video of Walmart and put it on YouTube; fan communities driving snippets of mass media moments to viral distribution through the online community (Stephen Colbert at the National Press Club dinner, for example); the famous OK Go treadmill video and the world of peer to peer grassroots music videos it represents (reminding Jenkins of vaudeville); lonelygirl15 (which reminds Jenkins of PT Barnum); the blurring of lines between real life and fiction in reality television; the emergence of YouTube as a political space with the tasering of a student at UCLA , George Allen’s racial gaffe, and the Saddam Hussein hanging going viral and effecting public opinion and election outcomes; the grassroots surveillance and sometimes vigilante action that mobile media afford.

(to be continued…)

Applying the principles of open source to cinema — using open source tools and methods (source material available to everyone to use as they wish) — combines DIY media with commons-based peer production. The producers of Elephant’s Dream claim it is the first “open movie”:

Elephants Dream is the world’s first open movie, made entirely with open source graphics software such as Blender, and with all production files freely available to use however you please, under a Creative Commons license.

The short film was created by the Orange Open Movie Project studio in Amsterdam during 2005/2006, bringing together a diverse team of artists and developers from all over the world.

Every year, John Brockman asks a question of a widespread community of thinkers and publishes it on Edge.org. I reproduce here my answer to this year’s question — “What are you optimistic about?” — in its entirety:

The tools for cultural production and distribution are in the pockets of 14 year olds. This does not guarantee that they will do the hard work of democratic self-governance: the tools that enable the free circulation of information and communication of opinion are necessary but not sufficient for the formation of public opinion. Ask yourself this question: Which kind of population seems more likely to become actively engaged in civic affairs — a population of passive consumers, sitting slackjawed in their darkened rooms, soaking in mass-manufactured culture that is broadcast by a few to an audience of many, or a world of creators who might be misinformed or ill-intentioned, but in any case are actively engaged in producing as well as consuming cultural products? Recent polls indicate that a majority of today’s youth — the “digital natives” for whom laptops and wireless Internet connections are part of the environment, like electricity and running water — have created as well as consumed online content. I think this bodes well for the possibility that they will take the repair of the world into their own hands, instead of turning away from civic issues, or turning to nihilistic destruction.

The eager adoption of web publishing, digital video production and online video distribution, social networking services, instant messaging, multiplayer role-playing games, online communities, virtual worlds, and other Internet-based media by millions of young people around the world demonstrates the strength of their desire — unprompted by adults — to learn digital production and communication skills. Whatever else might be said of teenage bloggers, dorm-room video producers, or the millions who maintain pages on social network services like MySpace and Facebook, it cannot be said that they are passive media consumers. They seek, adopt, appropriate, and invent ways to participate in cultural production. While moral panics concentrate the attention of oldsters on lurid fantasies of sexual predation, young people are creating and mobilizing politically active publics online when circumstances arouse them to action. 25,000 Los Angeles high school students used MySpace to organize a walk-out from classes to join street demonstrations protesting proposed immigration legislation. Other young people have learned how to use the sophisticated graphic rendering engines of video games as tools for creating their own narratives; in France, disaffected youth, the ones whose riots are televised around the world, but whose voices are rarely heard, used this emerging “machinima” medium to create their own version of the events that triggered their anger (search for “The French Democracy” on video hosting sites). Not every popular YouTube video is a teenage girl in her room (or a bogus teenage girl in her room); increasingly, do-it-yourself video has been used to capture and broadcast police misconduct or express political opinions. Many of the activists who use Indymedia — ad-hoc alternative media organized around political demonstrations — are young.

My optimism about the potential of the generation of digital natives is neither technological determinism nor naive utopianism. Many-to-many communication enables but does not compel or guarantee widespread civic engagement by populations who never before had a chance to express their public voices. And while the grimmest lesson of the twentieth century is to mistrust absolutist utopians, I perceive the problem to be in the absolutism more than the utopia. Those who argued for the abolition of the age-old practice of human slavery were utopians.