YouTube as social mediation

My response to an earlier post by R.R. While I usually respect R.M. 's opinions highly, because we don't have enough evidence doesn't mean that something pro social is not happening on YouTube. On the contrary. I believe when I see a particular video downloaded a thousand times that something highly social is going on... its up to the academics to figure out exactly the 'what' part of it, but I'd hazard a guess that individuals have a tendency to want to think and create in groups and whether they do it in person or with and through the media, they are engaged in highly beneficial activities... (this could be my future doctoral project in the making...)

Well, I found someone on my media listserve would agree with me that nothing is not necessarily not nothing. Ms. A. P. wrote the following on the listserve: "Granted, people who make videos of their cats and post to YouTube may not have "academic" knowledge of media literacy, but the fact that they've gone through the video-making process, and the uploading process, means that they probably do know at least a little bit about media. And hopefully that knowledge will give them insight into media that is produced by other folks. My opinion -- YouTube rocks. Sure, there's a lot of crap on there. But, for the most part, it's crap created by people in their livingrooms/classrooms/ wherever, and not stuff created by someone who had to test market first. Oh -- and there's also a lot of great stuff on YouTube as well. We should celebrate that people are getting off the couch to actually make media -- isn't that a big part of what media literacy is all about?" That was written at 12:37AM on a Sunday night and interestingly enough K.M. (a frequent poster on that listserve) wrote this back to her a scant 9 minutes later: "I think production *is* important to ML---but 'production literacy' doesn't mean 'content literacy' (analysis, understanding advertising techniques, etc...)."

I'd tend to agree with Ms. K. M. in that if people are invested in taking the time to learn to produce media usually they learn how to do it by themselves. They are conscious 'producers' of the media but are not necessarily conscious (and by this I mean 'aware') of the factors that contribute to audience reaction behind that production. For example, unless someone is told that when a camera is placed 'higher' than the subject, the shot takes on a subliminal suggestion of powerlessness or inferiority or that cameras placed lower than the subject projects the subject in a superior manner, this POV or point-of-view effect will have been lost on the producer. You frequently see this style used in home videos because the camera operator has not been taught the proper techniques of shooting, not because they are looking to do it to create that feeling in the mind of the audience. If the producer of the video is aware of the conventions of that media, one being POV and uses that and other techniques in the process purposefully, then there can be insight. That is what I believe can be taught to kids as young as preschool so that media becomes a place for them to express themselves purposefully.