Learning from YouTube

My alma mater Pitzer College has received a wealth of media attention recently for a class called "Learning from YouTube." It is the first college class in the nation with the popular video sharing website as its subject, with all of the assignments and classes also occurring on YouTube. Inevitably, the class, and in turn the college as a whole, has been criticized for its lack of educational value and essentially rendering it a joke.

Is YouTube not a worthy subject for study? The world watches more than 100,000,000 videos on YouTube daily, making it a media phenomenon without parallel. Media Studies is a discipline that critically examines our media, making it a crucial entity for its students to study. To me, the real joke would be to not investigate YouTube, to not question its implications. By giving something a free pass as something that doesn't warrant our critical attention, particularly something so huge, we give it the freedom to behave as it chooses without repercussions. Let us not forget that YouTube is a corporately owned enterprise. As easy as it is to consider it some sort of utopian by-the-people-for-the-people website, it is actually a privately operated entity that easily conceals this fact because of its ubiquity, much like Google. Wait, Google owns YouTube? Maybe there is something to this subject.

There are so many questions to put forth to this emerging form of media. Why do we YouTube? Why do we do so much of it, no less? How has it changed the media and the way we look at the world?

I feel that a lot of the public flack comes from the portrayal. It's very simple to describe the class as something where students are watching and posting YouTube videos without getting into its complexities and academic content. If all I heard was someone dismiss the course in such a manner, I too would think the professor, students, and college were idiots. And yet, that's exactly the problem. The mainstream media gets away with stating uninformed opinions as facts and dispersing these opinions to the masses. Media Studies scholarship exists to look critically at the practices of media institutions and question/critique its power and products.

Though I rarely watch television news, I often see promos which frequently feature YouTube related stories to attract interest. One such example I remember is when a local news program promised a story with the star of the YouTube video "I Got a Crush... On Obama." (Personally, I find the premise of the video to insipid to watch more than a few seconds of it, but I'll link it for your perusal.) Obviously, the program directors thought they hit gold by combining sex, politics, and an Internet phenomenon, and heck, maybe they did, but I do not consider this news. Hence, it comes as no surprise to me that the mainstream media works to put down the field of Media Studies, as it better enables it to get away with a variety of things we as the media-consuming public should not allow it to.

I'm particularly intrigued by this news clip that demonstrates no qualms about ridiculing its academic merit:

Prior to reporting on Pitzer, it airs a tribute to the Regis & Kelly talk show while also including an advertisement as to what time you can watch the show, not so coincidentally on the same channel. What makes that story newsworthy? Where is the journalistic integrity? They go out of their way to make Pitzer look ridiculous, rather than showing any number of the pretty locations on the campus, they instead show footage of the new dorms under construction. Also, the comment from the newscaster about the students enrolled in the class being lazy and incompetent is completely ignorant. It is my experience that all places of learning, with students of all intelligences, there are some who take their studies seriously, and those who do not. The newscaster outed himself as one in the latter group, and as someone who took college (well, my undergrad anyway) seriously and as an opportunity to expand my mind, I resent the implication that a scholar of Media Studies is lazy from someone who probably majored in broadcast journalism and learned nothing critical toward his own form.

You know who should host the news? Katy. Before the media attention, I first heard about Pitzer College's YouTube class from my housemate, Katy. While she was working for the PR department of the school, without warning, Katy was asked to tape the college's first YouTube press release. As someone with dyslexia, Katy's biggest fear is reading in front of people, so doing it on tape was all the more frightening. Fortunately, she did great, and the best part is when you can see her unscripted smile of satisfaction at the 1:07 mark after reading all the words correctly.

Good job, Katy.

Maybe my confidence in the quality of the class stems from my knowledge of the class' professor, Alex Juhasz. I had the privilege of taking two classes, both of which were academically driven, with her during my years in the Pitzer Media Studies department. Juhasz is a socially conscious individual who uses media as an avenue for her activism, someone who participates more often on the fringe of mainstream media rather than in the thick of it. For that reason, I can understand how awkward it is for her to discuss the merits of her scholarship with such venues as CNN to people who are either clearly missing the point or at least choosing to do so.

That said, Juhasz does a good job of explaining her course here:

Indeed, there is a lot that can be discussed with this development in media. Juhasz outlines the intriguing concepts of the democratization, pedagogy, access, expertise, control, limits, and censorship of YouTube. The class is largely student driven, based upon student discovery and participation on YouTube. Juhasz is the first to admit it is an experimental course that has potential to fail. Still, education is a journey, and even failures can be learned from. I think it's a mistake to assume that all classes should have a set plan and concrete objective. My most profound learning experiences were never clear from the start, but instead have been part of a more fluid path. Discovery, or failing that, the search that yields perhaps no discovery, is where true learning occurs. I'm confused as to why so many people seem to think that something that has not been studied before is not worth studying. On the contrary, I feel that those are the things most appropriate to study, in a sense examining the unexamined.

What worries me are some of the contributions from the students. One of the unique aspects of the class is that all of the classes are taped and posted to Youtube; the students' assignments are as well. While I don't have the time to commit myself to observing the class as closely as desire to, I have begun peeking in on the project, especially in light of the media attention. I keep hoping for the dialogue to be pushed to a more profound level, and while some students are taking it there, it seems that others perhaps did sign up in the hopes of getting credit for watching cute videos of cats yawning. It's early yet, so the level of discussion still has plenty of time to elevate to superb academia, and again, you have to expect some floundering to occur in courses that rely so heavily on experimentation, so I assure you that I'm hardly dismissing it.

Another unique thing about the form of this course is that, if I chose to, I could participate in it. Anyone can, really. There are certain aspects of YouTube not yet broached, and though I can silently hope that the class winds up there, I also have the ability to respond and take the discussion there. While I should feel empowered to do so, the very thought frightens me. Although I can blog endlessly with little fear of the information I put out there, no matter how incriminating and self-depricating, my insecurities prevent me from transforming myself into a talking head. But it's something to think about anyway.