It took a cultural anthropologist from Kansas to bring the house down at the Personal Democracy Forum social media networking conference in Manhattan.
His highly-technical message: YouTube may be full of trash, but you can use it to make people give a shit.
The conference brought together over 1,000 journalists, political practitioners, and assorted social geeks interested in technology and politics, most reeling from the success of social media in the 2008 election, and scrambling get on that train.
Michael Wesch, a cultural anthropology professor at Kansas State University, offered some keen philosophical insight. He warmed up the crowd with a history of the word “whatever.” In the 60s it meant, “I don’t care, whatever you want,” he said, but the MTV generation changed the word to mean “Whatever. I don’t care.” Now, he said, and juxtaposed the statement with a screenshot of his students, texting, typing on laptops, and looking like they hate life, “whatever means, “Whatever, I do what I want.”
Wesch talked about observations from this same class for his funny, sometimes startling meta-analysis of people on YouTube. About 200 students in Wesch’s introductory anthropology helped him analyze the nebulous YouTube community. Students both watched and participated, posting videos of themselves and culling the web for content that means something. Anything.
They found that the same conditions — ease and anonymity — that enable people to communicate hatefully (ie: cussing people out via comment stream) can also encourage them to participate in collaborative, artistic and meaningful projects. He mentioned an anonymous YouTube character in a mask who created a video of viewers with inspiring messages written on their hands. Wesch said it was an example of how new media will help “whatever” mutate further to mean, “I care, let’s do whatever it takes by whatever means necessary.”
And the attendees stopped tweeting long enough to give him a standing ovation.
The conference drew an intensely socially networked crowd, most of whom would kill to figure out what will resonate with an increasingly distracted public. Wesch and his sociological analysis basically told them what they wanted to hear: there’s hope.
Photo courtesy Personal Democracy Forum
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