global warming theorem on youtube

sorry to post so close to class...

a while ago i was sent a video about global warming. here it is:



there are a few things i think are particularly interesting about this. first, the speaker starts by asking people to respond to his video and tell him their thoughts. he asks for critical responses in the same way a scientist with a theorem would send it to fellow scientists for criticism and responses. by doing this on youtube, however, he is opening this dialogue up to a greater community of internet users, all of whom can comment with the same power to their responses.

second, at the end of the video, the speaker aknowledges the power of his medium. he speaks to the ultimate global warming questions of "what can i do" as he explains that the key is having a spreading knowledge. he states that, in a society such as ours, with so much information technology, there are tremendous opportunities for people to "speak" (or post) and be heard by many others.

third, i noticed that in the description section, the movie's creator wrote a long message about how you should not watch this video. he explains that, based on the comments he recieved, there are holes in his argument. becuase of this, he has made a much longer video series, addressing all of the comments brought up by people who watched the video. he explains that he is leaving up the video anyways, because it preserves a record of this dialogue: an example of an effective use of youtube for socio-political discourse.

finally, i looked at the comments on the video. i found that many of the first bunch were elementary school students of the man who made the film. as they all left rave reviews, it became clear to me that the video was powerful in multiple ways. he has a well-articulated argument in favor of taking action against global warming, but he has also showed many students how easy it is to share thoughts and beliefs using public media like youtube - a lesson these students will hopefully take advantage of as they learn and grow.

~julia

My video doesn't want to upload, so here's a link to my YouTube project.

One my favorite things about YouTube is all the clips/episodes people put up from my favorite childhood TV shows. This collection of videos features clips from some of those shows, starting with (to the best of my memory) the earliest shows I watched and ending with shows I liked in late elementary school. In case you're interested, the shows are (in order): Sesame Street ("Healthy Food," "The Word is 'No'," and "Yip Yip Monsters and a Telephone"), Care Bears, Rainbow Brite, Popples, TailSpin, Duck Tales, Tiny Toons, Animaniacs (and Pinky and the Brain), Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Bill Nye the Science Guy, Where on Earth Is Carmen San Diego?, and Where in the World is Carmen San Diego?

Sorry about the weird opening, iMovie keeps doing that to me.

Allison

<3 technology, right?

after seemingly an eternity of trying to get this monster of a file to upload on veoh since you can't upload videos longer than 10 minutes on youtube, i finally have found success.

here is my project. it runs about 12 mins. but there's good stuff in it, i swear.

alana


Online Videos by Veoh.com

Zillatube

So, like I was saying in class, at zillatube.com, there's a program that you can download to convert files downloaded from Youtube so that you can save them onto a hard drive or dvd. It only supports Windows, but as Brittany mentioned, you can do the same thing using some of the programs available at the media cloisters.

-Laura

"I approve of messages," or "Barack Obama cancelled 'My So-Called Life'"

A new Hillary Clinton ad on YouTube.


- freddy

Al Jazeera English

It's still not widely available in the US (as of last year, one of the few cable companies to offer it was city-owned Burlington Telecom, which serves 1,200 homes in Vermont) and its not exactly local access, non-corporate (funded by the petro-monarchy in Qatar), but Al Jazeera English does offer an alternative view for big TV news, particularly on the Middle East. Better yet, much of their content is posted for free on YouTube, from the standard news shows to odd talking heads and their entertainment show, which this week carried the entirety of last year's Oscar winner for best short film, "West Bank Story."

Also the Daily Show did a pretty funny spot on the channel a while back.

- freddy

The Intersection of Community TV and the Internet

This map is interactive at http://www.mappingaccess.com
There is an interesting blog by Colin Rhinesmith (M.A. in Media Arts '08 at Emerson College) to investigate the intersection of community television and the Internet. http://cmediachange.net/blog/

Vintage Satire

Sorry for the late post-had this up earlier on the site under a different blogger name initially.

Anyway, I find a lot of new media, particularly internet-based content lacking in substance. It seems that a lot of times authors, directors, and artists get caught up in the tricks of photoshop and iMovie (or FinalCut if you're dedicated) or audio editing and overlook the step of actually imbuing their creations with an original, interesting idea. Nowhere is this more evident than on YouTube, an extremely popular repository for parody videos, "funny" home accident videos, along with other attempts at humor often cheapened by overuse of star wipes, glitter, and the addition of bad music to hype up the video. Anyone can take a music video or coverage of a campaign speech and do a "funny remix" on youtube, like the spate of digital video copycats that resulted from the SNL shorts "Dick in a Box" or "Lazy Sunday". When so many seem to be substituting computer effects and editing tricks for real humor, I often find the greatest laughs from a decidedly low tech option: Married to the Sea, otherwise known as the "champagne of comics".

This little gem of a webcomic has provided me with laughs on a regular basis since I came across it last year. Every strip is an absurd story told with random illustrations, including victorian scenes and 70's instruction manual scenarios, which the author warps to his own twisted ends through the addition of simple Times New Roman style captions. He does some photoshop manipulation of the images to fit them in frame, but there is no alteration whatsoever beyond simply arranging them to tell a story. It often looks like the author has just ripped his illustrations out of some old textbook or airline safety card, erased a portion of it with the end of a number 2 pencil, and finally run it through an old typewriter to add his ridiculous commentary.

The whole presentation reminds me a lot of the DIY charm of the Paper Tiger TV video we watched in Alternative Media. I'm not sure if this actually constitutes "Alternative" (I'm not sure what that actually means at the moment either-perhaps soon), but it is certainly a rougher, more old-school (hah) option for your daily humor fix. I think for that reason it escapes the glut of parody videos and flash animation that constitutes a large part of mainstream internet humor.

The link is:
www.marriedtothesea.com

~Ben D