In this clip, Susanna Ruiz points out value in the massive volume of media content on the Internet, even as most of it is "crap." The crap serves both as a repository of content to be reinterpreted and placed in new contexts (the "remix culture") and as its own art to be judged by many groups of individuals, rather than by a select group of gatekeepers.
Moderator Wendy Levy follows with mention of curation. She says, "we're trying to get away from YouTube and more into spaces where we find trusted guides." I don't think getting away from YouTube is exactly how I'd put it, but rather that there is a need to serve both the curation and aggregation functions.
I am reminded of discussions I had this week with friends at YouTube and Wholphin DVD.
YouTube, like the rest of Google, has indicated that it will never create content, and its curation of content is even limited to featuring a few videos on the front page and in the different sections (Film and Animation, Pets & Animals, etc.). The value that audiences and content creators find in YouTube is mainly transactional: easy and fast posting, searching and viewing of (and advertising on) videos. YouTube is a platform, which has been expensive to create, but is vastly scalable and essential to many.
On the other end, there is Wholphin, a DVD magazine of short films, published quaterly by McSweeney's. The Wholphin team, consisting of only two people, travel to film festivals and solicit submissions to see hundreds, if not thousands of short films. They meet many filmmakers personally and pay all of them for the rights to license their films. It is a painstaking process that is most certainly not scalable without sacrificing quality, but the start-up capital costs are comparatively low. The delivery of the resulting DVD - published only four times a year, in high-end packaging, graphic design by Dave Eggers, with a booklet of "liner notes" - reflects the desired audience experience, completely the opposite of YouTube.
These two models complement, rather than compete with each other, and neither can be dismissed. I'm looking forward to exploring ways in which the two can work more tightly together.
