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Aug/08

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Context is an anti-pattern – the anthropology of YouTube

View Comments · Posted by Admin in Advertising, Pop Culture

Today I start blogging at Overlay.TV and I wanted to set the stage with an idea I have been working on for some time about the problem with context. My colleague Nadav Zin also spends a fair amount of time thinking about this and we bring different and balanced perspectives to the ideas, challenges and what this means for Overlay.TV, and all social media platforms in general.

I will be posting a deck and paper I am working on in the next month or so about "living in video" but I think it only fair that I point to one of the great thinkers, Dr. Michael Wesch from KSU, and the most important platform ever in the history of the internet for study of this issue, YouTube. I have Overlayed Dr. Wesch's video below with some links to the various subjects he discusses to make it a hopefully more useful resource (and to give it some context).


This video is not the point. The subject of the video is. Michael discusses what he calls "Context Collapse" which is the phenomenon formed by millions of anonymous viewers watching millions of anonymous clips, which may or may not have a thread that holds them together. This is compounded the comfort level of the new announcers/stars, the skillset to derive a level of quality in production and implicit semantics of the distribution of this content. What is most interesting about this compound fracture of media as we know it is that it really doesn't matter. What matters is that it is happening, and the volume to which it is happening outpaces the entire history of ABC every six months.Lev Grossman from Time Magazine sums it up with his thoughts on YouTube comments quite well. "Some of the comments on YouTube make you weep for the future of humanity just for the spelling alone, never mind the obscenity and naked hatred."

What can be inferred about the content from the thoughts of the viewers?

What can we learn from how people do what they do online now?

What is the long term impact of this shift in media centricity?

I want to explore these semantics more. I want to learn and therefore live with this in mind in all that I do. I think we have only begun to scratch the surface of what this means, but I absolutely intend to keep on scratching.

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  • http://www.redmonk.com/jgovernor James Governor

    They don’t call it small things, loosely joined, for nothing. We’re talking about a myriad of patterns and weak ties. the flipside as the professor says, some are aimed at an audience of around 100 people- so there is a micro context there.

    GREAT comment from @dan_mcweeney today: “The volume I play a song at is directly proportional to how much I like it why can’t someone harvest that info?”

    in other words – there is GOLD in them thar metadatas. The real value comes from the network watching us, rather than us watching the network.

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  • http://contextisqueen.com Context Queen

    I think you should expand on the collapse of context. People could take this the wrong way since most advertising today is built around content match or some context matching. How can we improve on this?

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