(Download) "Youtube, Use, And the Idea of the Archive (Essay)" by Lauren Shohet ~ Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Youtube, Use, And the Idea of the Archive (Essay)
- Author : Lauren Shohet
- Release Date : January 01, 2010
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 67 KB
Description
"AFTER" SHAKESPEARE ON FILM come desktop digital interfaces that put film--and films of theatrical performances, digital video, shots from mobile cameras, and other related technologies--on our laptops. As our titular "after" encapsulates, these downloadable texts are chronologically secondary, ontologically derivative, and commercially aggressive. These video-sharing sites, paradigmatically YouTube, act as an archive (of Shakespearean performances, among many other things) that in some ways contrasts with conventional archives, but in other ways reveals their long-standing but under-recognized aspects. Etymologically, "archive" conveys not only origin, but spatial fixity: the building wherein primary documents are kept. We now find ourselves with different kinds of mobile archives that we access through cyberspace--YouTube and Early English Books Online (EEBO) alike--and can ask what difference this peripatetic access makes, as the memorial function of these notebook-accessible digital archives replaces spatial lieux de memoire with environmental milieux de memoire. (1) Derrida claimed that "there could be no archiving without ... the archontic principle of legitimization, without criteria of classification and of hierarchization." (2) Technology seems alternatively to have amplified or to have run around Derrida's sine qua non of archival principles. (3) How do the uses that video-sharing sites sponsor--nonspecialist access, wild heterogeneity, fragmentation of samples, and temporal leveling--impact ways we imagine what archives are, how we use them, and how they use us? What uses can Shakespeareans and their students make of YouTube? And what might early modern scholars bring to analysis of emergent broadcast technologies? Teaching A Midsummer Night's Dream? YouTube offers almost four thousand clips, many of the "Act 2, scene 3 for Mr. Green's English Class" genre. Others show snippets of full-scale theatrical productions, commercial films, and far-flung adaptations. Some longer productions are available as well; the size of YouTube's upload allowance has changed over time, as has the response of copyright holders to unlicensed use, so that maximum length varies, but the norm remains under ten minutes. (4) The proliferation of student scenes suggests a particularly lively operation of Derrida's "archontic principle" of the archive: although governed by set principles of inclusion and hierarchy, the archive seeks to enlarge itself. YouTube's users continually post new clips to the archive, replay what thereby becomes a repertoire, and add new performances into the mix. Thus, the click of a mouse brings up not only staggeringly myriad student projects, but also such varied morsels as the 1935 Max Reinhardt Warner Brothers' studio film (in sixteen sub-ten-minute segments); seven minutes of Diana Rigg and Helen Mirren, plus a separate one-minute-fifty-eight-second segment of "a seminude Judi Dench" from Peter Hall's 1968 Royal Shakespeare Company film; motley offerings--frequently the trailer--from the 1999 Michael Hoffman film; Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck playing Demetrius and Lysander on 1960s television; and a Levis 501 jeans commercial rather incoherently set to Titania's ode to Bottom. Browsing the playlist reveals that searching a Shakespearean play on YouTube--presumably a significant, perhaps primary, encounter for many of our students--yields an experience that is striking for its variety, fragmentation, and temporal leveling.