2nd
Michael Wesch, professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State University, gives an excellent 56-minute lecture-based video-remixed presentation (on YouTube, by YouTube, and for YouTube): “An anthropological introduction to YouTube.”
As an anthropologist, I think of media slightly differently than most people. I don’t think of it as content, I don’t even think of it as tools of communication. I think of media as mediating human relationships. And that’s important because when media changes, then human relationships change.
Wesch explains that the emergence of YouTube, already surprisingly prolific when compared to the long history of broadcast television, isn’t mass media as we’ve come to know, even though anyone with a webcam can do it:
This is really a story of new forms of expression, and new forms of community, and new forms of identity emerging.
