Nov. 13, 2006

YouTube and the Cultural Studies Classroom

By Christopher Conway

“I saw a small iridescent sphere of almost unbearable brightness. At first I thought it was spinning; then I realized that the movement was an illusion produced by the dizzying spectacles inside it.”
—Jorge Luis Borges, “The Aleph”

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On December 17, 2005, “Saturday Night Live” ran a skit by Chris Parnell and Andy Samberg called “Lazy Sunday,” a rap video about going out on a “lazy Sunday” to see The Chronicles of Narnia and procuring some cupcakes with “bomb frostings” from the Magnolia Bakery in New York City. The rap touches on the logistics of getting to the theater on the Upper West Side: “Let’s hit up Yahoo Maps to find the dopest route./ I prefer Mapquest!/ That’s a good one too./ Google Maps is the best!/ True that! Double true!/ 68th and Broadway./ Step on it, sucka!”

Parnell and Samberg make it to the Magnolia for their cupcakes, go to a deli for more treats, and hide their junk food in a backpack for smuggling past movie security. They complain about the high movie prices at the box office ("You can call us Aaron Burr from the way we’re dropping Hamiltons") and brag about participating in the pre-movie trivia quiz. Doesn’t seem like much if you’ve never seen it, but for pure joie de vivre, and white suburban dorkiness, “Lazy Sunday” just can’t be beat. What makes “Lazy Sunday” special, however, is how its original airing coincided with the birth of Internet video-sharing, enabling the two minute clip to be viewed millions of times on YouTube, a free service that hosts videos posted by users. In fact, the popularity of the clip on YouTube was so great that NBC forced the site to remove it several months later, citing copyright infringement. The prospect of its programming being net-jacked by Internet geeks and magnified through YouTube’s powerful interface was just too much for NBC.

I bring up “Lazy Sunday” to foreground my discussion of the pedagogical uses of YouTube because it sums up its spirit and helps us define the genre of video with which YouTube is most associated. Although YouTube is awash in clips from television and film, the sui generis YouTube video is the product of collaborative “lazy Sunday” moments when pals film each other or perform for the camera doing inane things like dancing, lip synching or making bottles of Diet Coke become volcanic after dropping Mentos candies in them.

Parnell and Samberg’s references to Internet tools and movie trivia, as well as their parody of rap, perfectly capture a zeitgeist in which all pleasures can be recreated, reinvented and repeated ad nauseam through the magic of the Web. As Sam Anderson describes it in Slate, YouTube is “an incoherent, totally chaotic accretion of amateurism — pure webcam footage of the collective unconscious.” Whatever you’re looking for (except porn) can be found in this Borgesian hall of mirrors: videos of puppies, UFO footage, ghosts on film, musical memento mori about recently deceased celebrities, movie and documentary clips, real and faux video diaries, virtuoso guitar picking performances and all kinds of amateur films. In my case, the video that sold me on YouTube was “Where the Hell is Matt Harding Dancing Now?” — a strangely uplifting video of a guy called Matt Harding who traveled around the world and danced in front of landmarks such as Macchu Picchu in Peru, Area 51 in the U.S., the head-shaped monoliths of Easter Island, and the Great Wall of China, among many others.

OK, that’s all nice, but what can YouTube do for professors, apart from giving them something to look at during their lunch breaks? Inside Higher Ed has reported on the ways in which YouTube is causing consternation among academics because it is being used by students to stage moments of guerilla theater in the classroom, record lectures without permission and ridicule their professors. Indeed, a search on YouTube for videos of professors can bring up disquieting clips of faculty behaving strangely in front of their students, like the professor who coolly walks over to a student who answers a ringing cell phone in class, politely asks for the device, and then violently smashes it on the floor before continuing on with his lecture as if nothing had happened. It could be staged (authenticity is more often than not a fiction on YouTube) but it is still disturbing.

But I would like to argue for an altogether different take on YouTube, one centered on the ways in which this medium can enrich the learning experience of college students by providing video realia to accompany their textbooks, in-class documentaries and course lectures. Although I can’t speak to the applicability of YouTube to every discipline, in what follows I make a case for how the service can be harnessed by professors in the humanities and social sciences.

As a professor Latin American literature and culture, I often teach an introductory, third year course called Latin American Culture and Civilization in which students study history, literature and any other media that the instructor wishes to include in the course, such as music, film, comics and the visual arts. My version of the course emphasizes student engagement with foundational documents and writings that span all periods of Latin American history and that I have annotated for student use. One of the figures we study is President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, whose outsized political persona has made him a YouTube star. Apart from having my students watch an excerpt of his “Bush as sulfurous devil” speech at the United Nations, I assigned a series of animated cartoons prepared by the Venezuelan state to educate children about the Bolivarian constitution championed by Chávez. These cartoons allow students see the ways in which the legacy of the 19th-century Venezuelan Liberator, Simon Bolívar, remains alive today.

The textual richness of these cartoons invites students to visually experience Bolivarian nationalism in a way that cannot be otherwise recreated in the classroom. It invites them to think critically about the ways in which icons such as Bolívar are creatively utilized to instill patriotism in children. In a similar vein, a Cuban cartoon about Cuba’s founding father, José Martí, depicts how a child is transformed into the future champion of independence and social justice when he witnesses the horrors of slavery (this video has now been removed from YouTube). With regard to the Mexican Revolution, one of the most important units of the class, YouTube offers some fascinating period film of the revolutionary icons Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa, and especially their deaths. Although I cannot say that these are visual texts that lend themselves to the kind of rich dialogue provoked by the aforementioned cartoons, they are nonetheless an engaging visual complement to readings, discussions and lectures.

Another course in which YouTube has played a part in is my senior-level literature course on the Chilean Nobel Laureate Pablo Neruda. It may seem farfetched to use Internet video in a poetry class, but in this case, YouTube offers several useful media clips. I have utilized film clips in which Neruda’s poetry appears (such as Patch Adams and Truly, Madly, Deeply), as well as music videos of Latin American singers who use lyrics by Neruda. More than anything that I could say in class, these videos illustrate the reach and enduring quality of Neruda’s poetry in Latin American and North American culture. This said, there are a surprising number of student-produced videos about Neruda on YouTube that are cringe-worthy, the “Lazy Sunday” versions of the poet and his poetry. These are quite fascinating in of themselves as instances in which young people use video to interpret and stage Neruda, in ways that might be set into dialogue with more literary and canonical constructions of his legacy, but I confess that I am not yet convinced of their pedagogical value.

In this regard, the case of Neruda is not so different from that of other literary figures, such as Emily Dickinson, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Robert Frost, who are also the subject of interesting home-made YouTube videos. What do we do, for example, with a Claymation film that recreates Frost’s “The Road Not Taken"? I would argue that this film is interesting because it captures the banality of a certain canonical image or version of Robert Frost that is associated with self-congratulatory, folksy Hallmark Card moments.

There are all kinds of video with classroom potential on YouTube. Consider, for example, one of YouTube’s greatest stars, Geriatric1927, a 79 year-old Englishman whose video diaries document his memories of World War II, as well as of other periods of English history. Then there are the Michel Foucault-Noam Chomsky debates, in which Foucault sketches out, in animated, subtitled conversation, the key arguments of seminal works such as Discipline and Punish. There’s an excellent short slide show of period caricatures of Leon Trotsky, news reels and lectures about the Spanish Civil War, rare footage of Woody Guthrie performing, Malcolm X at the University of Oxford, clips of Chicana activist Dolores Huerta discussing immigration reform and a peculiar musical montage, in reverse, about Che Guevara, beginning with images and reels of his death and ending with footage of him as a child.

Don’t let me tell you what you can find; seek and ye shall receive.

YouTube is not necessary for good teaching, in the same way that wheeling a VCR into the classroom is not necessary, or bringing in PowerPoint slide shows with images, or audio recordings. YouTube simply makes more resources available to teachers than ever before, and allows for better classroom management. Rather than use up valuable time in class watching a film or video clips, such media can be assigned to students as homework in the same way that reading is assigned. However, to make it work, faculty should keep in mind that the best way to deliver this content is through a course blog. YouTube provides some simple code that bloggers can use to stream the videos on a blog, rather than having to watch them within the YouTube interface. This can be important because we may not want students to have to deal with advertisements or the obnoxious comments that many YouTube users leave on the more controversial video pages. On my free wordpress.com course blog, I can frame YouTube videos in a way that makes them look more professional and attractive (sample page here). At this point, courseblogging is so easy that even the least technologically-minded can learn how to use services like blogger or wordpress to post syllabi, course notes and internet media.

There are problems however, the most glaring of which is the legality of streaming a clip that may infringe on copyright. If I am not responsible for illegally uploading a video of Malcolm X onto the web, and yet I stream it from my course blog, am I complicit in infringing on someone’s copyright? Now that Google has bought YouTube, and a more aggressive purging of copyright protected works on the service has begun, will content useful for education dwindle over time? I don’t have the answers to these urgent questions yet, but even in the worst of cases, we can assume that good, educational material will be made available, legally, on YouTube and other such services in the future, either for free or for a modest fee.

For example, I am confident that soon I will be able to tell my students that, in addition to buying One Hundred Years of Solitude for a class, they will have to purchase a $5 video interview with García Márquez off of the World Wide Web and watch it at home. And, even as I write this, podcasting technologies are already in place that will allow faculty members to tell their students that most of their lectures will be available for free downloading on Itunes so that class time can be used more productively for interactive learning activities, such as group work and presentations. Unlike more static and limited media, like PowerPoint and the decorative course Web page, video and audio-sharing help professors be more creative and ambitious in the classroom.

In sum, my friends, YouTube is not just for memorializing lazy Sundays when you want to “mack on some cupcakes.” It can help your students “mack” on knowledge.

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