Learning from the Book Tour

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). A few beginning thoughts, now that I’m live, and being read and even talked to (btw: write a texteo in my book and talk back through the v-book, please!)

-The video-book is harder than most online experiences (more dense and has its own rules of navigation) and this turns readers off. Food for thought for other budding digital-auteurs, and like everything else in this self-reflexive process, useful in its failures.

-Along this vein, the video-book takes time. I’m suggesting now that people should give it the length of a movie, not the three clicks usually afforded a web-site. It takes that much commitment to take in its logic, scope, scale, and structure, which in some ways makes it like a book (that is if you all actually read books, and don’t just buy them as a sign of [later] commitment).

-Users really don’t like my (highly limited, fiercely constrained, but ultimately, I think, empowering) mode for commenting (see link above), and feel it goes against the best of the internet. They want a wiki.

Two more cool things: this article in the Chronicle of Higher Ed and an invitation from the Library of Congress for “inclusion in the historic collection of Internet materials.” Who knew!?

Filed under: digital media form, media ethics, media publishing, media studies, praxis, web 2.0, YouTube Tagged: commenting, Learning from YouTube