October 24, 2011
Youtube / Draka
 Having recently watched a video clip of an old Burning Man favorite I mentioned in an earlier review, which I posted recently, I find that I'm feeling a little ambivalent about it for a few reasons.Here's one of them: As I fairly laboriously put together about a page worth of posts about the Draka site, I suspect that few readers will doubt that I like the subject of this video, but I'm not completely fond of the style. One has that whole booming base sound in the background, and an "extreme travel" style of presentation that practically leaves one waiting to see the part where Larry Harry jumps a motorcycle over Center Camp. "YEAH! Whoo! Hey, Larry, do it again, naked and on fire this time, carrying a chain saw!" No, it's not like that. Burning Man has its reckless moments, but the more commonly prevailing spirit at the event, at least at the time this video was made, seemed to be one of free spirited, creative, eccentric mellowness, and the filmmaker doesn't seem to capture that or even really try, maybe because "we're wild! WHOOOO!!!" is an easier message to sell to an audience and build up ratings with than that of a collective creative happening, especially when the producer only has one minute and forty seconds of expensive airtime in which to portray an experience that builds up over a week, at a minimum? Which I understand in the context this clip arose in - it's footage from the Discovery Channel and the economics of Cable Television are a given, albeit not as harsh a given as those of Network Television were a generation ago, given how many more channels cable can carry. However, we're not on Cable right now, we're on the Internet, where a producer has all of the time he or she wishes. Why import the weaknesses of an old medium into a new medium? What would have been better than a possibly copyright violating reposting on YouTube of network footage would have been an original video made by a participant who took the time to tell the story he felt, instead of feeling the need to race to tell a story that would sell. The talent is definitely present in the Burning Man community to tell it honestly and with a little flair and in the case of YouTube and Metacafe, maybe to be part of the solution instead of what might be seen as a growing problem. |
Lately, as one drops by these sites, which not very long ago were these pleasant, creative quirky places where one got to watch film making become folk art, one finds the creative content beginning to be squeezed out by repostings of commercial content and those pointless hatefests. A lot of people seem to want to take a short cut to being seen in the same place as that creative content, without having to do the work that goes into making such content, and this is badly watering down the content that draws visitors to the site in the first place. Yes, this is merely a new form of an old problem that predates the Web, the "signal to noise ratio" problem that ended up doing in Usenet as a serious cultural presence, one that hotlinking on the Web (or mutual friending, in the case of a social networking site like YouTube) helps the reader evade, to some extent, but it obviously represents a significant drain on Youtube's and Metacafe's resources, one which we, as reviewers, should not be encouraging, even to the small degree that our encouragement matters. I can understand why Ms.Nigro (the creator of Draka) and her friends and fans would be excited about her appearing on a well known channel like Discovery, and congratulations to her for getting that coverage. I certainly don't mean to run that down, and if that person up on the TV screen was me or somebody I knew, I'd probably be the king of the geeks getting that news out. "Look, look, you can see when we ..." That's fine, and a few excerpt videos like that, posted by those covered and their friends and family aren't going to kill the YouTube experience. I think. How many of those are there likely to be - and are those the words I'm going to end up eating? Well, maybe, but life is about trying to work out reasonable compromises with oneself and others, as one makes a few highly fallible guess about how things will work out along the way, and the way I'm working out the compromise with myself on this one is as follows. I understand the bandwidth consuming nature of video. "We were on TV and would like to show off the footage" is a reasonable thing for a group to want to do on its site, and Youtube offers a site owner a reasonable, affordable way of doing so - by embedding the video of one's fifteen minutes of network fame on one's site. Cool. If I come to somebody's site and see such an embedding, I won't think any less of the site for it. Seeing that won't keep me from linking to the site or giving it a thumbs up. But I'm not going to link to the video, itself. If the site owner wants the extra review, link and traffic from me or somebody else who thinks the same way, the site owner will need to upload an original video, the owner's own original content, even when the owner's own work is the subject of the video, because however understandable the personal horn tooting is, and with however much good will we may accept it, the fact is, it still represents a watering down of the content on the hosting site, which posting additional original video content will help alleviate. In other words, "you broke it, so you bought it, or at the very least, you should be prepared to put down a downpayment", or something like that. |
| If, to consider a very different case, I come to the site and the video so embedded is uploaded nonoriginal content which isn't about the site owner or those associated with the site owner, then that I would almost certainly very much hold against the site, enough so that I would pretend that I hadn't seen it. In the case of a certain cooking video, if that gets taken down off of Youtube and reposted, I might consider reviewing the reposted video if there are no objections from my current host, because I had already invested a significant amount of time and effort into reviewing that video before I ever thought about this issue, and I am loath to walk awy from that work. I don't feel that would be a reasonable thing for me to ask of myself and there is a greater social good to be served by exposing abusive charlatans like Ramsay, a good that is not served by destroying pre-existing work that was made in good faith, before the personal establishment of the principle under discussion. Linking to and reviewing to such a replacement video puts that work in context, and helps the reader understand it better, and so I'd probably do that. Some of the same points apply to the far more pleasant Draka video. Truly new videos, yet, ones which I have not reviewed and am not invested in, are going to have to meet the originality test. I don't care how good the footage is, unless this is exposé time or something like that, if it's nonoriginal material, posted by somebody other than the creator, I just won't write a review of it and I will thumb it down, and I would urge others to consider doing likewise for the reasons given. Places like Youtube can be a wonderful resource if treated with respect, and if people taper off on rewarding the abuses of such sites, they may remain to be enjoyed by others for years to come, a desirable outcome that nobody need make any particularly crushing sacrifices to achieve. Give and take. Yes, I'm helping to keep a limited collection of pirated videos alive in the sense of making visitors aware of them by talking about them, at least if I'm allowed to do so, but the number of nonpirated videos, ones which I won't hesitate to promote, will climb without practical limit - a finite number of them being made, but so many that the number might as well be infinite. With such incentives in place, if such an argument would be widely accepted, the proportion of nonoriginal material onsite would, at least in theory, tend to decline if posting responded to rational incentives, and the incentive was (as I suspect it is) the desire to have one's postings seen. While the ideal is not achieved in perfection, the overall goal - that of nudging the signal to noise ratio on places like YouTube in the right direction or at least providing incentives that would produce such a result if at all rationally responded to, would tend to be approached in the limit as time goes on. The more participation one sees in this sort of response, the more desirable nudging one gets. The idea is not premised on the unreal condition of universal participation. For that reason, philosophically, I think that this is a reasonable standard to apply in such cases, and submit it for your consideration. |
Add a Comment
burningman has disabled commenting.