Idea Lab

YouTube Orchestra Brings Together Musicians Around the World

by Alexander Zolotarev
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Well, it's Susan Boyle again singing "Now you say you're lonely," being not at all lonely with her 61 million YouTube viewers. That number makes the appealing British singer 61 times more popular than the YouTube Symphony Orchestra Global Mash-up musicians with their 1.1 million views. But the YouTube Symphony, a unique experiment uniting musicians from around the world, may be the one to watch (you can view the video embedded below). Ms. Boyle is singing a jazz standard and the YouTube Orchestra is playing the Internet Symphony #1 Eroica composed and conducted by the Chinese maestro Tan Dun. Both...

• May 28, 2009
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Convergence and Disturbance: New Media, Networked Publics, and Pakistan

by Henry Jenkins
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The above video is one of a large number posted via YouTube by students in Pakistan to share what was happening in their country during the 2007-2008 political emergency. During a time when the government was tightening its control over traditional media, citizen journalists took on vital functions in fostering public debate, insuring the spread of important information, monitoring elections, and helping the outside world understand what was happening. Huma Yusuf, a recently graduate Comparative Media Studies student, has shared an important analysis of the role which grassroots media played during the crisis through the Center for Future Civic...

• February 4, 2009
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Human Rights Video in a Participatory Culture

by Henry Jenkins
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

One of our goals at the Center for Future Civic Media is to identify best practices from existing projects which might inform those initiatives which will emerge from the Center. We want to understand how people out there are using the tools available to them right now to enhance civic awareness, to play informal watchdog functions within the culture, to call attention to problems and force governments and other institutions to respond, to skirt around censorship and other kinds of regulation over communication, and so forth. We are looking at a range of different models -- from serious games to...

• April 6, 2008
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Michael Wesch: Toward an Ethnography of YouTube

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I'm currently at DIY Video Summit, a well-organized gathering of academics, video-bloggers, and other web enthusiasts and critics. The first panel provided an overview of the state of academic research regarding online do-it-yourself video. A lot of the conversation centered around theoretical definitions of what constitutes an "amateur." All of the panelists and many from the audience observed the blending of the professional and the amateur. Now commercial endeavours use 'amateur' as a hot marketing buzzword (think porn, American Idol, Laguna Beach) while amateurs try to represent themselves as professionals. I thought the most interesting speaker was Michael Wesch. Wesch...

• February 8, 2008
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