youtube

Toby Miller, Chair of Media and Cultural Studies at UC Riverside, chatted with me over tofu for his podcast, CULTURALSTUDIES. Since last summer, Toby has recorded meandering, lively and detailed conversations with scholars, artists, and activists and he releases them in unedited real time on his podcast to 1000 or so subscribers, all probably three men and their dog in Sweden, according to Toby. ... read more »

I’ve been on the road with the video-book: CAA, NYU, University of Toronto and OCADU. I’ve been having fun, and learning a lot too during long and intense Q and As where people are actually critical and productive (in this sense it feels more like a film screening than my image of a book tour, but maybe that’s because showing the video-book is more filmic in that it is screen-based, live, loud, and defined by images). ... read more »

Earlier this week MIT Press published a ‘video book’ called ‘Learning from YouTube’ by Media Studies Professor Alexandra Juhasz.  The book is not of the physical kind, nor is it a downloadable file for your Kindle or iPad.  It is a website-book which has been peer reviewed and given an ISBN number, which exists in, amongst and around YouTube, with the site being the subject matter, field of research and platform for dissemination. ... read more »

YouTube is baked; its video forms and conventions badly done. We’re stuck with corporate media-like “stunts, pranks, violence, gotchas, virtuosity, upsets, and transformations.”

Sure, every video holds its own small surprises and variations, but this is expressed in a vernacular and melody with which we are already comfortable. ... read more »

My video-book goes live today on the MIT Press website. I hope you will take a look, contribute a texteo, and share it with others who might be interested (handy promo here: juhasz flyer). With nothing to buy, sell, or hold, it will be interesting to see how the work fares. Please let me know what you think (by authoring on the vbook). ... read more »

Virgina Heffernan’s recent article on the joys of the “vook—a software application that combines video and text”—brings to mind what MIT and I are calling my video-book (to be released online February 7), “large scale online writing that depends upon video, text, design and architecture for its meaning-making.” I like her effort to differentiate vooks from ebooks: writing in sentences, paragraphs and chapters that has been wedged onto a digital screen (allowing for both search and easy p ... read more »

I’m in the final stages of editing and readying my video-book, Learning from YouTube, for “publication” or perhaps, better said, official presentation by the MIT Press. Given the unique nature of the product (virtual and free) it’s been yet another scholarly publishing challenge to invent the terms of its release. ... read more »

Bill Moggridge‘s Designing Media just arrived at my doorstep, hot off the (MIT) Press. The book is really beautiful and a great read, marking the zeitgeist of cultural producers’ takes on the role and future of media. I’m interviewed in it, along with real luminaries, innovators, and rulers of the universe, so I’m truly honored, mostly humbled, and certainly proud to be there. Sandwiched ... read more »

I am learning much teaching Learning from YouTube again this semester. Last week I was educated by my students about this:

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I have been teaching from three scholarly books (Burgess and Green, Snickars and Vonderau, Strangelove) devoted to YouTube for this year’s go at ... read more »