 What I'm going to talk about instead is really what I think are some of the philosophical questions that emerge from the shift To a certain kind of cinematic medium or form that we knew to the entire phenomenon of YouTube. Oh Yeah Is this fine? Yeah So on on on the 21st of August 1911 Winsenzo Perugia left with the Mona Lisa in his hands and he left instead an empty space there and I find this to be a very interesting and a paradoxical image because Curiously More people came to see the empty space than they had come to see the Mona Lisa and this idea of the blankness in the empty space as Signifying this kind of the heart of you know the disappearance of a certain kind of a signifier and what it leaves for us to imagine Was kind of repeated and this is in a story by G. Jack when he talks about how with the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe there was this momentary kind of you know a poria where There were all the rebels who were waving the flags except that there was no new national flag So they had the old flag the only thing that they could do was to carve out the red star from the flag So here they were waving this kind of empty flag with the red star that was missing It seems to me that the present moment that we're living in in terms of the transition from kind of Forms of media theorization and forms of theorization or mediatic experience We're looking at a stage where there is this kind of moment of blankness Where one is not sure what to do with the older kind of modes that we had you know Whether it was the stuff that we inherited from film studies or media theory To make sense of this proliferation of what's been happening in the domain of new media And I want to open out a few questions really about this Idea of how we can focus on just one site in which a lot of these issues from questions of political economy To technology authorship and appropriation Curatorship and censorship all emerge and that side is really you YouTube first of your statistics There are over 800 million unique Visitors to YouTube each month. There are over four billion hours of video that are watched each month on YouTube And there are over a hundred thousand hours of video uploaded to YouTube every single day This boggles. I mean these statistics seem to make things less rather than more intelligible And I think there's a real kind of an urgent need for engaging more seriously with what's happening Since the only people who seem to be otherwise producing a theory of new media is of course the state and that narrative is a familiar one Which we've all kind of been hearing in the last few days. It's a technophobic Kind of approach combined with a political opacity that makes for a very kind of heady combination The fiasco of what happened in Bangalore around the entire rumor of attacks on people from the northeast, etc And the subsequent backlash which I'm sure we'll talk about more in the last session but in 2009 Carl Dorbow of the Strategic Studies Institute authored a book called YouTube war fighting in the world of cameras In every cell phone and Photoshop on every computer and the title more or less summarizes and frames the entire issue And what you know follows in the book But I want to read out one segment of one paragraph from the book because one part of the story is familiar enough to us It's the you know post-border yard story of violence as a media event But in the next portion of the book is very interesting. He says Terrorists and insurgents are now no longer dependent upon professional media to communicate In fact to unprecedented degree the professional media have become dependent on them This is due to technological developments which permit any terrorist to film edit and upload their actions Virtually in real time whether Western media are there to witness or not So one of the sign of the time seems to be that the paranoia and suspicion that engulfs the technological subjects Produces a kind of range of recognizable figures. There's the pervert in his cubicle There's the terrorists wielding the cell phone and there's a pirate in the network Now some of the work that I've done in the past really deals or attempts to kind of investigate these discursive Figures, but what I'm interested in doing today is a slightly different phenomenon I'm interested in looking at a far more quotidian ordinary figure of the producer of Culture in the realm of spaces like the YouTube like like YouTube This for example is believe it or not YouTube is most watched video of all time And we're talking here about something like six billion views has anyone seen this video here. Yeah. Oh, okay Yeah, you're a fair number of people. Yeah, I mean, it's I Have seen this video over and over again, you know as a media as someone attempting to understand media There is this threshold limit that I find myself in often when it when it comes to YouTube to make sense of this entire Phenomenon there is a genre of categories in YouTube videos and they call the WTF videos Which primarily signifies this entire perplexity of how is it that these videos are being watched over and over again? And that's something that I want to try to make sense of this is a farm of talented one This is one of the second or third most watched which is the the evolution of dance But Justin lappy is also like the new YouTube star as it was so YouTube is creating this entire phenomenon of new stars new kind of, you know Content creators etc. Now there have been a number of attempts at kind of giving a political economy account of this And one of those influential of these was something that was done by Chris Anderson in his book called the long teal Chris Anderson was the editor of the wired the argument of Anderson was really in terms of trying to understand the move away from What he describes as a blockbuster principle Arguing that the Pareto principle and everyone's familiar with the Pareto principle Pareto principle will simply that you know Over a period of time Pareto found that 20% of people in society control 80% of the wealth And that was something that was mirrored in every aspect of social life Whether it's in the idea of the organizing of the market So for example 20% of all the books in the world will account for the sales Whereas 80% of the books will never be sold or 20% of films are the ones which will be the hits 80% of them Will never be watched, but it's this 20% that accounts in a way for the entire market so this Pareto principle that Begins as it were you know to to to dominate and we know this to be true of the film industry in India of the music industry in India Etc. And what Chris Anderson does is to challenge this idea by describing what he describes as a long teal He says that the Pareto principle very typically has a very long edge on top and a very very narrow You know teal But what he says is that what's happening with the internet economy is that you have the emergence of a much longer tail Right so and here he says a few very interesting statistics He has a conversation with a music entrepreneur who runs something called jukebox and he is asked by this entrepreneur To guess how many of the tracks which are available on jukebox, which is over a million have sold at least one copy per quarter Now the Pareto principle would naturally say you know 20% or so But the answer stuns Chris Anderson because the answer is 98% So 98% of the tracks have sold at least once in each quarter, which means that there is this crazy niche market Where it's not a very successful market. It's not a blockbuster market But there is this market that's emerging for all kinds of of your media commodities and media goods Which would otherwise not have been available at all So the challenge is that that Anderson poses really is how does one pick him and how does one widen the long tail? And that's the question and he are he says that they there are a couple of factors that enable the long tail The first one is of course the democratization of the means of production the fact that you have you know The ability to make let's say your own music and to circulate it online Enables you to enter a market, which is otherwise determined entirely by per square foot basis So the argument was that you know if you take the way, let's say a crossword or a landmark works It works entirely on the logic of how much space a book occupies occupiers So it's per it's calculated on a per square inch basis So if a children bugger is going to sell 150 copies a day it justifies its existence over a long period of time in let's say a landmark and Every independent distributor knows this to be the problem. The problem is that you do not have a long shelf life No in a bookstore. You do not have longevity. You do not have visibility, right? You're immediately hidden if you don't sell you're taken out of the market, etc So the long tail one aspect is this democratization the second thing is the democratization of the means of Distribution which is the extension of this shelf life because technically the shelf life of a book can be extended infinitely So even if you do not have visibility in the way that you did in a landmark or a crossword It doesn't really matter because you can technically have a sample of your book Available online in in perpetuity. The third is the connection of the demand and supply Now one of the things that is crucial to all of this is of course the entire question of viral networking and a word of mouth culture and He has a very nice phase where he says, you know, what happens when ants have megaphones And I want to take this question because I think while YouTube is indeed the best example of what happens when ants have have megaphones People like Anderson have provided us with an overall sense of what is happening with these new technologies of distribution But we really get a sense of the philosophical questions and consequences of the ship What is happening in the long tail in terms of this phenomenon of the Charlie with my finger kind of logic? What is it that is people what is it that people are producing? What is the logic of the circulation of certain kinds of videos and images and what does it say of our times? This is an image I actually had an embedded video, but it was on a max So it doesn't play but these are the back-dom boys and they are in some ways the first superstars of YouTube for those of you who are not familiar with this the back-dom boys are basically two Chinese students Huang Ziying and Weiwei from the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts in China who became instant celebrities when in a state of boredom They made a lip-sync cover version of a very popular backstreet boys single using nothing more than a cheap single digital camera on their Computers in their respect in their kind of depth dormitories and it is and for those weren't seen the video They incredibly incredibly talented and this is In this video was the first one to propel them into stardom at a time that if you on YouTube typed backstreet boys The first hit that you got were the back-dom boys, right? And the second video that you got was the official backstreet boys song that they were This is I want I wanted that way Now people decried their fame and said let's face it. It doesn't take a lot of talent to make faces They didn't write the song. They didn't sing the song. They didn't play any musical instruments Their sole accomplishment is that they made faces at a camera. That's not talent, man And if they weren't Chinese that is if they didn't have the freak factor of Chinese boys lip-syncing to backstreet boys songs Nobody would have noticed this This was the initial kind of response that came and yet the fact of the matter is a lot of people noticed it The back-dom boys apart from the cult developing around them and various kind of internet memes that were devoted to them now There are hundreds and hundreds of versions of this kind of the the back-dom boys They were also featured live on NBC and both dropped out of the academic programs to become hugely successful brand ambassadors and Spokesperson for some of the largest media brands, but this is the ironically kind of Reappropriation that always happens. They both acquired a celebrity status and are now role models On on television channel hosting their own shows So the first challenge for me is that how do you make sense of this this kind of phenomenon? Amongst media theorists in East Asia They use a phrase called Kuso to describe a range of media content on YouTube on what I would describe as the micro content Right, there's an entire range of because the entire format of YouTube Which is the less than 10 minute video is the emergence of the micro stars and the emergence of this kind of micro content So you see our view East Asian theorists use this idea of Kuso Kuso the root the root words of Kuso are from Taiwanese Which is from Kuso gay, which is also Taiwanese and Japanese mixture the word Kuso gay is a Portmanteau of Kuso and game which literally means shitty games the introduction of this category or a category such as this is Teach gamers how to appreciate and enjoy a game of poor quality such as appreciating the games outrageous flaws instead of getting frustrated them So Kuso Refers to the situation of not only how does one make things into garbage, but also how do you turn garbage into things? It started as a sub-cultural phenomenon But is now highly popular in mainstream cultures on reality TV on youth-oriented channels like MTV and channel V and in local performances Nishant's your immediate theorists and cyber cultural theorists pose the question of the readability of these digital objects or events And he says how we to make sense of this kind of junk that is available on the internet and how do they become cult objects? Rejecting the idea of parody citing the fact that the idea of parody and its deep rootedness Within a certain Western paradigm of intertextual practices do not actually capture the sense of what's happening Nishant argues and suggests that if we place their production as Kuso It allows us to realize that the objects that are being parodied in the video are not American popular cultural forms or Specifically backstreet boy videos. What is being parodied is the original self of the performers in the back down videos What we see is a lifestyle choice that is coded in consumption of cultural forms accessories appearances class differences language and most importantly the conditions made available by technology The original object then are the three boys and their real or original status and their lived practices in other words Even as Nishant rejects the easy and by now passe categories of appropriation and brookal arch which were fashionable You know when postmodernism had its 15 minutes of fame what he's unable to do is to move beyond the other is Other family events that you will be inherited from cultural theory. They'll be resistance and performance, especially your gender identities Equally themselves formulas that have been familiar to many cultural studies approaches to understanding youth culture Interesting for me Michelle Shaw uses the phrase digital cinema to describe this entire range of Microcontent that's produced specifically for a platform like YouTube The question that I want to pose is what are the consequences of using cinema as a paradigm of understanding these practices The emergence of photography and film as new media at the turn of the 19th century Unsettling the ontologically stability of the visual arts a century later You see a similar de-stabilization of film with the emergence of a wide range of visual practices enabled by digital technology So what are the consequences of the shift from semi-noid to digital for film history and film studies? How do we make sense of the shift of the ontological basis cinema in photography? Do the emerging realm of the immaterial digital image the technological question is a very crucial one here because the way Very often the way format of the small screen and the various technologies of encoding video are inseparable from the kind of Experience that one has of the image itself So in the case of a lot of the YouTube videos the the idea that you're creating it for a screen of a particular size and encoding it in a manner that you wanted to stream kind of you know In an efficient manner is also the question of What is the language of the camera that one speaks of when one speaks about YouTube videos? Because more often than not these videos are created by people sitting in front of their Computers and what is the recording device is not an external camera? But really the camera that's embedded within the computer device in one of the guides that was written on how to create Better YouTube videos because you can see this entire language of Authorship quality tastes etc. It's not gone entirely it resurfaces in a very different way in the in the YouTube world So there's an entire guide on how to make better YouTube videos in which Vandik Uses the term snippet to refer to the transient status of a clip with within the potential The endless process of reusing recycling etc. He says play to the medium strength Know that your video will be seen in a tiny window on a small computer screen and then shoot it accordingly Use lots of close-up keep the background plane avoid long shots and employ simple images with high contrast Visual subtlety is not your friend If the camera was an apparatus For staging a mise-en-scene then here it is replaced by the computer or the camera within the computer and these did it digital objects Or events share both an immediate proximity But equally a distance from cinema if cinema was about a spectatorial experience a Simultaneity of the spectator producer on YouTube seems more complicated and stabilizes the very idea of what constitutes a work itself Get low ink following Lev Manovich instead characterizes the experience of watching YouTube videos as the experience of databases He says we no longer watch films or TV. We watch databases instead of well-defined programs We search one list after another It's always the promise of the next video the video that throws up in relation to a video that you're watching So you're never watching a single work You're always watching a database workout through the logic of the search results now This seems to be very similar with the experience of pornography in you know on online Where we have to admit that contemporary pornography is less Pornographic in the sense of a reference to sexual material or sexual content But more in terms of a reference to forms of distribution and circulation Describing an experience of surfing pawn on the internet a feminist writer says I caught myself clicking through to a gallery Taking in the contents with a glance and backing out to click through to the next gallery I didn't need to spend much time with the pictures to feel the titillation upon That's what gives me a hint about what it must be like to be obsessed with online porn That the search as much as or more than the pictures is really what turns you on No individual picture or video can be as novel or as exciting as you hope it will be So you keep searching and looking looking and searching You're never satiated because if you just masturbated to any particular picture or video You'd miss out on all those other ones, right? So it's this endless idea of the the click-through Right, so pornography is no longer about the good old-fashioned having a page of a magazine open and you know kind of enjoying yourself It really is about this constant traversing through a Database so how we to make sense of this kind of economy of the excessive of the image Loving characterizes sheer volume video a volume of videos on YouTube as the YouTube sublime in walking the content sense of You know the sublime as the sense of being overwhelmed by in his case You know natural phenomenon translated into aesthetic categories But I would try to like look look at this in terms of a certain idea of understanding in terms of a frenzy and the accelerated logic of Circulation in his work on the on only visual Technology is John comelli describes the intensification of the whistle visible produced by early visual technology and the production of what he calls The field of the visible as direct human vision of events places and bodies Began to be mediated by an optical apparatus that sees in place of the naked eye now Linda Williams Borrowing from commonly describes the visual hardcore knowledge or the hardcore pawn Pleasure that's produced by pornography as a frenzy of the visible. I would argue that pornography on the internet and as a way of Understanding our own Spectatorial practices seems to produce something akin to the frenzy of the real or the frenzy of the live and in this case The real is specifically referenced through its immersion in the domain of the private the explosion of sexual scandals Why are the leaked MMS's which circulate incredibly on on the internet seems to suggest Something of this nature the turn in TV towards reality TV the popularity of live webcam Transmissions the rise in sexual scandals like the MMS's all share a common ground in their quest for an unmediated reality Digitalism then seems to exist at the cusp of an inability to believe in the hyper real on the one hand and an intense desire For the real which is grounded in degraded and unintelligible images as though quality becomes the marker of the relationship to Indexicality and I want to show you an interesting example here. Oh, this is another one which has always perplexed me This is called. How can she slap and this is basically a leaked Kind of video for a reality show which is really tragic It's about this kind of thing that goes horribly wrong But there are hundreds of means of this from Afghanistan to you know the US to from Netherlands to Germany There are hundreds of means of this and you know what one really can make out what's what's happening Some of them are extremely well done extremely talented versions of this But the example that I want to show you is a very example a very interesting example of someone called Vishal Gupta Who was kind of this? You know, he was having fun in front of a webcam And figured that if he placed his index finger and his middle finger and he drew, you know with an ink You know kind of black and he just made a mark between the two of them He figured that if he placed his fingers before the webcam, he could simulate a naked woman so he starts this web telecast and Soon he has hundreds of people who are chatting with him asking him to perform for them now there is something absurd about this image because Apart from the sheer, you know ridiculousness of it He then places his thumbs on top of them to simulate breasts But this idea that there are hundreds and hundreds of people who are chatting with Vishal Gupta and trying to you know Follow this kind of live performance How we can make sense of this desire for the degraded image in a time when you have Pornography of all kinds and very high definition available for you. So there is this You know, there is this kind of paradox is there in the realm of of cinema You have a move where all films tell you that we have X X being 12,000 13,000 special effects Right, so there is a move for the hyper real in Michael Maan's film called Dillinger There is an attempt to create as it were an imaginary filmic history in terms of you know, so there is All kinds of examples of this Jody Foster's contact in which the director was not happy with a particular expression of Jody Foster They change it digitally they altered it So it doesn't matter if you even give a performance of a certain kind because that can be digitally altered and yet at the same time There is this move towards the degraded and the downward image. So let me try to kind of bring this together I will suggest that the various digital objects that could be you know Seen as artifacts of an incipient digitalism are yet to find a taxonomy leave alone an ontology The puzzle of what a digital object or a digital event is recalls for us questions that were popular in classical film theory Which have been out of fashion for a while including the various shades of realism from ontological to perceptual to photo realism, etc It's not surprising that the digital moment has also been accompanied by a return to various figures of classical film theory including Buzzy, Neppstein, Balash, etc A critical component of the loss of the cinematic experience is an account of the change in the Heightened experience of cinema and ourselves since the theatrical experience entailed the commitment not just to our solitude You know in space and time of theater But a solitude that we shared with others whether intimate or strangers in the presence of something larger than ourselves call it the screen of the World so if you were to take the classical experience of the platonic cave as being that of theatrical experience There are two things that I play there's proximity in the size. So even as the screen was much larger than life You shared a proximity with strangers or with intimate people of a very close nature Even as you had a great distance from the screen the first shift that happens is of course when you move the screen from From theater to television where all of a sudden the screen is much smaller The proximity that you had is also much closer now But the space that you shared with those around you is also altered because it's more an intimate space It's the family or it's the living room The television comes and radically alters the architecture of the Indian middle classes house because everything then becomes centered around the Television screen as the mediator as it were a space So this idea of the transmission that that takes place between proximity and size gets further complicated the moment You start watching films on your computer and here I'm talking about the desktop not the laptop yet We're all of a sudden the body is now, you know kind of straightened up again Because once we were watching television our bodies had had loose had loosened We were lying down and watching it here You had to sit over again and there only a maximum of three or four people who could watch it But your proximity to the screen was even greater the screen had become smaller than the television as well And finally the condition under which most of us watch, you know films now, which is on our laptops lying alone very often watching the film so the proximity between screen and you gets even closer as the proximity between you and other people kind of Completely increases you more often than not watching films on a laptop alone If you were to take the example of horror films a genre that we all enjoy But we enjoy specifically in the company of other people we all get scared of horror But we don't get scared of it because we watch it in the company of other people People who really enjoy horror films will admit that they rarely watch it alone Because this is a marker and a way of a certain isolated experience that was not there the classical Cinema so one were to take this kind of the ontological duration of these moments as Mediums move from let's say old media to to new how we to think about the philosophical consequences One could speak a lot about a lot of the work that's been done by Stanley K. Well on the idea of the screen as That which is not a screen the world away from us, but screens the world was okay. Let me let me wrap up So if cinema offered us Okay, so arguing against the standard media theory with scene sees the turn towards the digital as an increasing process of disembodiment Mark Hansen would argue for a return for an engagement with the experience of the body in new media for him the digital era and the phenomenon of Digitization demarcates a shift in the correlation of two critical terms media and body Hansen argues that as media loses their material specificity the body takes on a more prominent function as a selective process Of information it is a body scope of perceptual and affective possibilities that informs the media interfaces that we encounter This means that with the flexibility brought by digitization There occurs a displacement of the framing function of medial interfaces back onto the body from which they themselves originally sprang But the body itself in this encounter with media becomes a site of indetermination if cinema offered an image of the world And ourselves to it what happens when these screen images are replaced by mirror mirror images Which are grainy and blurred in one of the stories Borges remarks that mirrors and copulation are abominable Since they both multiply the numbers of man What seems to be at stake with the multiplication of technologies of image making is not an not not a settling off But a further ring of our ontological restlessness Cinema offered the body one plane of connectivity to sensation But a change in medium offers another form of connectivity by moving away from the known plane of analysis Namely the ideal form of cinema to the micro content that we see on YouTube We begin to approach media in an untimely manner which allows us to see them as Unstable objects which are both less than and more than cinema and in this regard the question of ontology is an inseparable from that of medium a medium is that which stands between us in the world as a representation and Returns us to our perceptions by way of the self-consciousness of the medium and the argument I suppose would be how do we actually become a little more self-conscious of the various kind of mediums that have emerged rather than taking Them on as just qualitative kind of deviations from known forms of old media. I'll stop here for now and take up