Because the ukulele theme popped up at the end of class, I can't resist sharing this rather stiff instructional article I wrote: http://www.ehow.com/how_5070360_strum-baritone-ukulele.html. The comment at the bottom is about right in its tone, but hey, my PayPal account swelled by a few bucks. It's worth noting here how difficult it is to write about certain skills, particularly musical ones. Thus, the beauty of YouTube learning.
Speaking of YouTube, here's a silly video that's become a hit in our house:
I'm not sure if the version I just embedded will have it, but the version I looked up on YouTube begins with an advertisement. This is something that aggravates me somewhat; one never saw this sort of thing at the dawn of YouTube. The early days of the printing press, as Sheldon mentioned in class, were consumed with figuring out how to make the new technology profitable. With the Internet, as was (and is) the case with much of the media that preceded it, advertising seems to be the answer to the how-to-pay-for-it riddle.
In my last post, I suggested that Shirky's optimism may be steeped in a somewhat conservative faith that "institutions" will arise to make sense of the new media landscape. But if these institutions--and YouTube is surely an Internet institution by now--are transformed into profit-making businesses (that essentially exploit user-created content with very little overhead), have we really changed anything significant about the way our society functions? And is the end of professionalism really to be celebrated if it means a regime in which creativity is still book-ended (old-fashioned metaphor) by "words from our sponsors" with even less compensation for artists? How long before Julia Nunes becomes a Horatio Alger myth, if that makes any sense? I fear that the Wild West of the Internet is rapidly becoming Bakersfield.
But back to the Mean Kitty song. It's good. Not "deep" exactly, but it does communicate a message in an entertaining way without using "text" (though he must have spent some time on the lyrics). I really want to learn to do video-editing on a computer. I like the implication that literacy in this century will mean something much broader than reading and writing. If one can easily and cheaply create a message using video, text, music, and, hell, holograms, and if that becomes our standard expectation of the components a message should be made up of, then it's inevitable that all educated citizens will be basically fluent in those skills, both in terms of production and interpretation. That would be totally cool! It would also enable brilliant rebuttals like the following:
Now that that's settled, I'd like to mention our old friend, Dana Gioia. I ran across his name in a Poetry magazine review of a new anthology of rap (Adam Kirsch, Feb. 2011). I can't link to that hopelessly dated print source, but I can link to this: http://www.danagioia.net/essays/ebohemia.htm. In true Internet-research fashion, I haven't read this entire essay, but I probably should. Gioia calls rap "the new oral poetry," which made me think of the "old" oral poetry: all the freestyling the Greeks did before Homer, among other things. Does the Internet present some full-circle moment? Do rap videos about house pets reveal a shift to post-print, performance-based oratory? And is there a Phaedrus 2.0 argument to be made here? Something along the lines of, "YouTube videos should be made as aids to memory only. The YouTube video which is produced with intelligence in the mind of the learner is far more powerful."
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