DrJoolz Snapshotz on Life

Apparently, in line with modern trends to put stuff online, a funeral director (S Clarke and Son) is making his funeral services available to watch online. Rivetting stuff. . And you can see for yourself … check out the website here.

But I prefer the ultimate in multimodality on YouTube … This video has it all … sound; text; moving images, and FOOD as ART… . Here we have speed painting with chips and ketchup.

Henry Jenkins is producing a series of excellent videos which will be just great for the new online MA in New Literacies.

Here is Henry Jenkins talking about his project:

See here for example the series on video blogging - how to do it and why….

Anya mentioned the PEW website where I have discovered a LOAD of useful papers, research based stuff, plenty of quantitaive data, that will be invaluable for my presentation in Swansea later this month…

Anyway … time for a smoothie … mango and raspberry

Found this website for people who have good strong family values but still like using the Internet (is there really such a family?)

One of its guarantees is that it is:
Consistent with commonly-held family values. Most parents don’t want their kids watching ads for beer companies, casinos and the like. So even though they frequently have entertaining videos (this is intentional, of course), they won’t be featured here.

So yeah. Go here and have fun (or not as the case may be.)

So, don’t you love this figure I made ? I did it here: M and Ms character creator

It is a mashup that is to say it is created from content derived from a number of sites.  You can see quite a lot of mashups on YouTube - using video spliced from lots of sources. Like  here.

It is different from culture jamming,  but could be confused with it. Culture jamming is pretty much ant advertising while many mashups are actually marketing ploys. Culture jamming transforms one media message into another like this.

Anyway how about making your own nike ad using  this mashup here.

The other week when YouTube was bought by Google, the site had a great deal of press. Here is a Youtube member responding.

One of the results of this was that the nature of the videos on there got slagged off.

For example on ‘Have I got news for you’ Andrew Neil talked about the drivel on YouTube and intimated that anyone who looked at the videos were stupid.

It seems that for a long time we have wanted our entertainment to be increasingly polished; we have wanted no chinks to shine through. We have wanted performances to be polished, the visuals to be beautiful and the dialogue clever.

But. I think that people are now going back to an enjoyment of the rough and ready and people are enjoying the amateurish. people are liking it when they see how things are done; where they can see throuh the chinks. They love the films made in people’s bedrooms or where people laugh at the wrong spot.

It reminds me of how people used to let Mummers in their houses. Or of the daft players in Midsummer nights dream - the play within the play - where no one can be mistaken that this REALLY happened. It is unashamedly, people just pretending.

See these Mummers:

See this from Midsummer Night’s Dream:

similarly so many of the youtube videos are easily penetrable - that is it is obvious that they are ordinary people making films for a range of reasons. They are unashamedly filmed in houses and tell simple stories about ordinary people. They are not supposed to be polished. See this one called ‘Drama Queen’.

Then there is

Or Hope is emo.

There are squillions of these little stories.

Anyway I was listening to a programme on radio 4 about the resurgence of story tellers. (my brother is friends with two of the people on the show - Ben and Hugh - how famous is that??) Anyway the show was talking about the phenomenon of ’seeing the whites of people’s eyes’ as they tell the story. This is partly a metaphor; although they meant it literally too, that part of a live story telling experience is in the physical intimacy. I think it is also about the ability to detect the person who tells a tale as ‘like us’, as ‘close’ as ’sharing the same space’. Is this part of he appeal of Youtube’s amateurishness?

I have decided that my next piece of thinking is going to be around the ways in which social networking allows people to produce and to share in narratives in a way that has been part of our culture for hundrreds of years. I want to write about this some more.

Human beings are naturally tellers of tales and suddenly we are wanting other types of tale in addition to the polished ones that we have been getting from tv and film over the last several decades.