Melissa Chan IML 501 Portfolio

YouTube and Copyright

 Kuhn focuses on YouTube, how they regulate user generated content, and fair use. Students used pieces and clips from The Daily Show and The Colbert Report as a critical rhetorical tool to argue and expose larger political issues, but these works were taken down due to the suspicion of copyright infringement. Kuhn rightly points out the fallacy of YouTube’s reporting system. It assumes guilt rather than innocence and does not consider the importance using media to produce knowledge.

Considering the watchful eye of YouTube, how can we create media on a platform that critiques existing structures? What kinds of rhetorical or formal qualities can we use to develop media that has the potential to be liberatory? These were a few questions that came to mind while reading Kuhn’s work. She points out that there are alternative platforms to mainstream YouTube, such as YouTube.edu and the Internet Archive, and she also mentions that she has had to develop workarounds to make up for missing functions that would have been available on YouTube. In a way, this reminds me that the media critic must retain their creativeness in not only their scholarship but in their technical skills. It also prompts me to wonder about how ideas will develop in a space where media stylos or critical media is getting more prevalent and how we can get past such limitations brought on by capitalist enterprises.    

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