Zach Legend
* ISU grad – took name from “Larry Legend”
* didn’t like to write, but found YouTube was a great outlet for expression
* got a contract doing videos for the Colts
* keep it 2-3 minutes (“get it done”) – short, for viewers (“how short can you make a video”)

Capture sounds and images:
* Tech is great: small digital camera w/ mic – no lights, higher tech (“I don’t even know what an audio feed is”)

Get is off the camera:
* connect device (typically with USB)
* copy file to hard drive, into separate video
* import into a video editor (Windows Movie Maker, iMovie, etc)
* edit stuff – lots more footage than what is used
* save movie file to HD (Windows = .wmv)

Publish it:
* YouTube allows 100 MB max
* “The internet is a whole new beast.” – trying to capture things and get it out faster and faster
* get account, log in
* “Upload” link – title, description, select video category
* Tags are important
* browse to video movie file – click upload, “and go have a drink” (it can take a while)
* embed code, so you can blog it (but it may take a while longer until it is available)

Future
* looking for more opportunities, expand away from Colts (only 20-week seasons)
* “worked my tail off” to get to a point where I can ask for money
* a wedding video takes about 20 hours
* look for product placement – “It’s a new medium, trying to get money out of these things”
* Can edit tags – sometimes, change tags to people in the news (“sure, you make some people mad, but what do you have to lose, it’s just YouTube”, “try to keep hot”)
* you can turn off comments – “YouTube are mean people” (go to their page, and they don’t have a single video)
* You’ve got to have a thick skin – “you made it, it is your expression”
* video is under my control – if I stutter, trip, etc you’ll never see it on the video

* “At Notre Dame, I twice caught ticket takers not saying ‘Welcome to Notre Dame’” – head usher saw it and apologized, got to go through the tunnel and into stadium – usher had been using Zach’s videos for the last two years as a training video (“Notre Dame Blue Gold 2008“)

Notes:
Richard Edwards of the New Media Program at the IUPUI campus for the School of Informatics will be speaking on “Citizen-Generated Content: The Rise of Video Mashups in the 2008 Election”

lots of types of media (blogs, wikis, etc) that are out there – I’m concentrating on video mashups

showing the “change” video — compiling all Presidential candidates mentioning the word “change”
* if there is an “emerging auteur” of mashups, it may be Hugh Atkins

* combinatorial, collage artists, DJ and VJ culture (turntablism, remix … add unique spin to it)
* what are going to be the consequences of this particular media form – the mashup – and how we make up our minds about particular candidates

Example 2: “Vote Different” (Phil De Vellis as “parkridge47″)
* March 2007
* 1984 Mac commercial with Hilary Clinton playing the role of Big Brother
* “you’ll see why 2008 isn’t like 1984″
* close with an Apple logo shaped like an “O” (for Obama)
* pseudonym refers to Clinton’s address, implied Clinton’s role of Big Brother (spawned a search to identify the creator)
* media pundits thought this signified the start of the YouTube election (Phil De Vellis has as much power as James Carville) …
* never before did a video mashup matter

Example 3: Coldcut vs. TV Sheriff, remix of “World of Evil” (2004) from Revolution:USA website
Actually began 3 years early, in 2004
* first election in which video mashups mattered … trying to influence Bush-Kerry
* 10-second snippets uploaded to a web site – Cold Cut’s “World of Evil” as background
* done by local LA DJ (TV Sherriff)
* RUC instructions – prior to YouTube – had very easy-to-follow instructions on how to take video clips and mix into a video mashup

Types of political video mashups
From 2004 …

Parody/Satire
* sappy 70s love song duet soundtrack – video of Bush singing to Tony Blair
* taking existing genre, and edit existing video on top of audio

Intertextual, Political “camp”
* deals with intertextuality (requires understanding of something)
* “The Apprentice” – the ultimate job of president, with Donald Trump firing him
* by True Majority Action ( “showGeorgeTheDoor.org”) – “we’ll fire Bush together, and have some fun along the way” … sponsored by Ben Cohen (Ben & Jerry’s)
* you can participate, not just passively watch

Recombinatory, Reconstructed
* Bush State of the Union
* “By custom, we meet here to threaten the world.”
* “The American flag stands for corporate corruption, … etc. and rape”
* “Our first goal is to show contempt for the environment”
* There is a website that collects reconstructed State of the Union clips

Remix aesthetics & mashups:
* participatory
* activist
* collage/bricolage – some of the best mashups are doing it with 1-2 videos, very creative
* performative – type of performance art, demonstrating a process as well as a product
* DJ as media creator – not a lot of articles on video mashups, so much owes to recombinatory tradition of DJs, academics would need a foothold in that field

Changes to user-generated content:
* celebration of web 2.0 (Time Magazine Person of the Year = You)
* social networking
* DIY media – citizens on the bottom creating media on their own and sending it up (elicit tensions between that and top-down logics of traditional media)
* materials going through the Internet are low resolution, even as homes are upgrading to high definition

YouTube and CNN Debate – media flows and moderation
* “hybrid media ecology” – internet portal and established cable operator, produces novel media flows
* over 300 videos submitted to CNN
* if ask people under 30 if the right questions were chosen, they would say no … CNN chickened out
* at the last minute, CNN decided to assign the task of selection to a senior employee (cut for odd reasons of vulgarity, questions too outside the box)
* ended up encouraging citizen content, but in the end being afraid of it
* are authentic questions coming to the fore when our gatekeepers are so powerful

In hybrid media ecology,
* The Daily Show and Colbert Report
* growth of “power pop politics” (Obama Girl, Hilary Clinton on SNL, “Huck and Chuck”)
* Not new -> Bill Clinton proving his street cred on Arsenio Hall by blowing a sax
* Blurring boundaries

Web-based campaign media:
* Hilary Clinton at a cafe, Bill walks in, selecting some table jukebox music, ordering -> to pick her campaign theme song
* allegory to the Sopranos ending … complete with a staredown from a mobster

The celebrity-citizen:
* Obama’s speech, set to music by someone from Black Eyed Peas
* “Yes, we Can”

Participatory media: Andy Cobb’s “John.He.Is”
* many parodies of
* spoof with John McCain speech providing the lyrics to the song
* “Bomb, Bomb Iran”

paratexts and critical digital intertextuality
* Jonathan Gray, Edwards and Tryon
* on its own, it has no particular value … but it might solidify or push a certain notion of a candidate
* Reese Witherspoon from “Election” with Hillary Clinton and Barak Obama clips – with Hilary = Reese
* use of meaning of 1999 film “Election” to describe the 2008 Democratic campaign
* media has picked up on this as an interesting insight

Mashups as Rhizomatic texts:
* non-linear
* non-hierarchical
* anarchic
* networked
* ‘open’ texts – demands that someone takes work and remixes it

1000 Plateaus

1) Allegories of citizen empowerment (Edwards & Tryon, 2008) – do not want to deny that more citizens than ever before have had an impact

2) The need for new approaches to media literacy (Henry Jenkins, Howard Rheingold, et al) – can ask questions about how are we dealing with this type of participatory media culture

3) The role of mashups in deliberative democracy:
* the perpetual beta of political video – popular culture, social networking, civic engagement and political participation
* the limits of Eisensteinian intellectual montage (“montage should lead to the emergency of a new idea”) – we are seeing the limits of montage
* YouTube as knowledge space

Questions:
* Do mashups create “information cocoons?”
* Are mashups like “customized information?”
* More like propaganda or more like wikis? (Infotopia)

Abstract: From 2007′s Phil de Vellis’s “Vote Different” to 2008′s Will.i.am’s “Yes We Can,” video mashups—as a form of political discourse—have become extremely popular in this election cycle, and signal the rise of the “YouTube election.” The proliferation of video mashups relate to the growth of online video sharing, remix culture, social networking and DIY producers actively engaged in creating “citizen-generated content.” This talk examines the recombinatorial and generative logics behind video mashups and the discursive strategies utilized by remix artists to examine the effectiveness of political video mashups as tools for candidate advocacy and political change.

Biography: Dr. Edwards is an Assistant Professor of Media Arts and Science in the New Media Program in the School of Informatics at IUPUI. He received his Ph.D. in Critical Studies from USC’s School of Cinema-Television. From 2002-2004, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at USC’s Annenberg Center for Communication’s Institute for Multimedia Literacy. His scholarship focuses on social and political uses of new media and new technologies. He has published several articles on new media activism, and is currently working on a series of projects focused on exploring civic engagement in multi-user virtual environments

Some good regional tech news to push out to people at the Bloomington Geek Dinner tonight at Michael’s Uptown Cafe tonight at 6p: Indiana is having a Blog conference next month (two of them, actually There is another one by Blog Indiana in August at IUPUI).

Blog IN event coming April 26
Mark your calendars. It’s official. We’re having a Blog IN on Saturday, April 26 from 1pm to 5pm at IUPUI School of Informatics in Indianapolis. Our goal is to attract as many bloggers as we can from around the state for a half-day of fun, learning, relationship building, tip sharing, and more.

We are planning some fun surprises to help raise awareness about the power of blogs (and bloggers) to make a difference in our state. We also want to help newbies get started, so the event will have something for veteran bloggers and tire-kickers alike.

More information will follow in the coming week, but the plan is to spend an afternoon in late April hosting an unconference-style gathering of bloggers publishing from Indiana. Here in Bloomington, we have a sizeable blogosphere, much of it coming out of the IU School of Informatics. It isn’t a great time for most students—the last Saturday before finals week here at IUB—but it is a great opportunity for local bloggers to make an impact on forming interest and setting policy for Indiana technology and communication.

I’m going to be talking to the SOI administration to see if it is possible to sponsor a bus to the event and include other local bloggers for the ride north. Join the Smaller Indiana discussion group to keep in the loop.

Related to this … Smaller Indiana is planning a coordinated pre-event event on April 14 (the first Monday after returning from CHI in Florence, Italy, for many HCI students and faculty). Indiana bloggers are being asked to gather at the Circle monument in Indianapolis at noon that day, rain or shine, armed with laptops with the hope of live-blogging the event. For those of us who won’t be able to make the hour drive north in the middle of a school day, Bloomington and other satellite cities are going to plan our own version of the noon gathering. As SI organizer Pat Coyle wrote,

“We want to show the world that Indiana is a tech-savvy location.”