YouTube and Archives, Scarcity and Abudance

A room for viewing UCLA Film and Television Archive materials in the Powell Library.

I've been in Los Angeles since early August with Elana and our two children mixing business and pleasure. Some of the time we have been tourists, and some of the time we have been doing research at the UCLA Film & Television Archive while one kid goes to day camp (the eight year-old) and one is in the care of a babysitter (the two year-old). The initial motivation for the trip was (1) to get Elana time at the archive to watch old soaps for her book project on the history of daytime drama, and (2) to spend time in LA, a place we have both been eager to explore. Elana has been here a few times before doing research, but I had only visited on a family trip in 1985, when I was thirteen. Finding research for me to do here too was secondary (though it got me to apply for and receive a small-ish amount of travel funding -- and something productive to do for part of the three weeks we have been living in LA). As it turns out, there are materials in the Archive’s collection that I have been excited and grateful to access, that will be important for my work. I made some discoveries here too. 

The research I have been doing is for my book project on early video games. I have been watching television commercials for game systems and game titles from the 1970s and early 80s, news segments on video games from the early 80s from the News and Public Affairs (NAPA) collection, and an episode of the anthology drama Insight with a video games theme from 1983 (this was a discovery - I hadn't known about this series, and I watched several more episodes while here, all of which are fascinating in various ways and maybe material for a future blog post). 

As in a previous research trip, I have been wary of “wasting” my time here looking at things that are freely available online - i.e., on YouTube. Every time I checked Google to see if the commercial I was watching is on YouTube, I said a little atheist prayer that I would be unable to turn it up online. At the same time, I would be a bit relieved upon locating versions on YouTube: my note-taking at the archive would not be the only record I would keep of my viewing. Any time I did find the same item on YouTube, I downloaded the video (using the Chrome extension FastestTube) and saved it to my research files for later reference. My folder of commercials is now swelling with videos downloaded from YouTube, many more than I have watched in archives. But of course YouTube is an archive, and increasingly it is the archive. It's a dangerous fallacy to assume that everything is online now, but it's also important to recognize how much public value there is in easily accessible materials that have only existed for a short time. I find myself in tension between these two kinds of excitement: at finding so much on YouTube, but also at finding the really good stuff that is not on YouTube. 

You probably know why finding useful, important materials that are not on YouTube excites me. Perhaps most of all, it justifies my travel here, my time spent in the archive. It also gives me something to write about that others are unlikely to have discussed already, offering a claim on originality. It fits the romantic narrative of research as a quest for rare artefacts, for revealing clues along the way to solving the big mystery. It  lets me perform a certain kind of scholar identity - I’m no mere armchair theorist, I’m a historian in the archive seeking documentary evidence. If your work requires a trip from Milwaukee to Los Angeles, that must make it distinguished and significant. There's also some of that self-satisfied elitism that comes with scare knowledge - like the masculinist record collectors, cinephiles, sports fans, etc., one-upping each other with the rarity of their acquisitions and experiences.

But there is something a bit distasteful to me about the fetishizing of scarce archival artefacts in which I fully admit I participate. In a way I’m upholding a hierarchy of materials and practices, in which websurfing and watching YouTube videos is a kind of casual scholarship - if you can call it that - that practically anyone can do, while accessing the materials in the archive is more serious and productive. In the introduction to her book Welcome to the Dreamhouse, Lynn Spigel writes of a distinction between "high" historical research in government or university institutions, and "low" research undertaken in retail environment, shopping for memorabilia and pop culture ephemera. She indicates an intention to "scandalize these divisions." (13) I would like to propose a similar point, but substituting watching videos online for shopping. 

Watching videos online isn't the only way of accessing the moving image culture of the past, but we can do a lot with what we have available. Yes there are problems. There is the bias of the present to contend with - YouTube only has what people in the past seven years have deemed worth sharing. This bias applies to archives too, and YouTube is much more democratic, its "curators" and "archivists" representing much broader constituencies than those of institutions. There is often a question of provenance and completeness and identifying information. Sometimes we don't know what we're looking at on YouTube, and I never know if I can trust the YouTuber's facts - how do they know this was on TV in 1977? There is an ephemerality, too - things that were there once are gone, things that are there now might vanish tomorrow, and the copyright regimes of the future might end the freedom of access we now enjoy. 

What I was most excited to access here were commercials for video games that I have never seen before, and I wish I could post them to YouTube - or that the archive could. This would help it broaden a mission of access to match its efforts at preservation. Issues of rights stand in the way, and as the archivist here, Mark Quigley, explained to me, advertising is often harder to clear than other forms of media because of uncertainty over who actually holds rights to materials - clients or agencies. It might not be possible to get me rights to reproduce images from these tapes or disks for publication, which I might like to do (I will probably request that the archive seek permission from the rights holders, but I'm not that hopeful). 

Sometimes archival materials come with helpful identifying data. The spots I watched were often preserved and deposited on reels submitted for awards. I often saw commercials preceded by title cards identifying the agency and the date, and sometimes other creative personnel (e.g., if an ad was submitted for an award for photography, the DP might get a credit). I don't remember ever noticing a specific date and ad agency given in YouTube tags or descriptions. Some of the ads I watched here represent video games and other electronic toys as space-age computer technologies, or as "new wave" trends for hip young people. Some of them are different from other ads I have watched. 

However, despite knowing who made them and when, I have no way of knowing from the archive's catalog or from the materials themselves whether these ads ever aired on American television. All I know is what I have found out at the archive - the catalog info and the info on the tape or disc. One reel I watched was of Canadian commercials that aired in the early 80s, but I only recognized this because I grew up in Canada in the early 80s - not because of any effort to identify the materials by nation in the catalog. Another researcher might assume they were American ads. One benefit of YouTube videos is that we know they were aired, and recorded off air, and their descriptions and comments often add more context. It is only by having been broadcast in the first place that they have made their way to YouTube: someone recorded them with their VCR and saved the recording. In some ways this information is as valuable as the data available from an official institution.

YouTube videos can also be easier to study. One skill this trip has called upon is detailed transcription and description of speech and images. I am not ordinarily accustomed to this kind of detail-focused task. In most of my writing I have had video copies that I have personally owned of texts I am analyzing, and have often rewatched segments as necessary while writing about them. In writing about these archival videos I have only had one crack at the text, and I would pause and rewind frequently, eager to quote correctly and note details I might need to describe later on. I watched one episode of Nightline on video games from 1983 that I almost completely transcribed, only leaving out some short passages that didn't seem relevant enough to warrant the effort. I spent a whole morning just on about twenty minutes of video (when you subtract the commercials and the brief segment on a different topic). I wish that episode would be posted online. It would get a huge audience, I think, of retro gamers and more generally Gen X'ers nostalgic for the early 80s. A young Sherry Turkle appears talking about her book The Second Self -- about men in pinstripe suits replacing their lunch hour transcendental meditation with a midday session at the video arcade. A PTA official complains that kids are wasting their meal money and bus fare at the "video parlors," and that their time there isn't adequately supervised by adults. A junior high principal on Long Island calls video games "another nail in the coffin of our country." 

To wish that items like this were on YouTube is to desire to share and make accessible the media of the past. It seems wrong to feel good because this tape is only available to me as a researcher in an archive.

Most of all, what I want to point out here is that one archive is not better than another. Archives, public and online and institutional, are historically useful, depending on your interests. The scarcity of the institutional archive doesn't make it superior to the abundance of the public online archive, and vice versa. There is value in both scarcity and abundance. Historiographically, scarcity is more manageable. Abundance can be daunting and it makes our work more time and labor intensive. But it's also, obviously, such a blessing to media historiography. And while it's easy to access, the hard work is to make sense of it all.

Powell Library, home of the UCLA Film and Television Archive.

My flickr photos tagged los angeles are mostly not of UCLA.

My tumblr fraktastic contains images relevant to this research project on video games; my tumblr giferrific is just GIFs.

Under the Idea Tree

In which I want to avoid becoming a video-games scholar.


The biggest thing to happen in my media experience this year has been the acquisition of a video-game console, a Nintendo Wii, on February 12th. This is the first console I have ever owned. I wanted an Atari in the early 80s but my parents wouldn’t get me one. Of course, I played lots of games at the homes of friends and family, and had some handheld games as well. (Digital Derby, and a pinball game whose name I can’t remember, were two I played a lot.) In the early 80s I used to walk to a convenience store in the neighborhood with friends or with my brother to play Tron, Ms. Pac-Man, Tempest, and pinball, and later we used to go to a place on Bathurst St. near Wilson called Video Invasion for birthday parties.


I used to understand Tempest.

By the time I was university-age, I had pretty much lost interest in most gaming but I did like to play Ms. Pac and Pole Position for old time’s sake at the arcade near my Montreal apartment called the Palais d’Amusements, where my roommate Mark bought hash and played pool with a small-time dope dealer named Claudio.


I wished I could be Ricky Schroeder so that I would live in a house with arcade games.

There was that one undergrad semester when I played too much Tetris on my PC (a 286 IBM clone) and dreamed of falling shapes set to Russian music, but I deleted it from my hard drive before the full extent of academic damage could be done. If very casual games count, I guess I too have wasted a few dozen hours now and then with Windows’ Minesweeper and Solitaire and Facebook’s Scrabulous. I once played a GTA game for an hour or two at Jason’s house, and more recently I’ve played a few rounds of Guitar Hero with my brother-in-law. And this was pretty much the extent of my experience as a gamer until February 12, 2009.


Sweet emotion! (not the author, obvs)

For the past week, all I have really wanted to do is play Mario Kart Wii, a driving game featuring the most popular characters in the history of electronic gaming. Part of my interest in the Wii in general, and in Mario Kart in particular, is how well suited it is to family play. Our five year-old son, Leo, is the house champion in bowling and he is improving at Mario Kart, though to do really well he has to sit on my lap and let me help steer. Like watching football and American Idol, we get a huge value added from playing games with Leo, amused by his strong reactions and emotional investment. He dances to the songs he likes on Idol and gives his own judgments of performances before Randy et al. give theirs. Now he is building racetracks out of Hot Wheels and Thomas train gear on the living room floor to mimic the ones he sees in Mario Kart. His play is our delight.


Mario drives a Kart

But my more intense motivation is to master the game, which requires discovering all of its intricacies and possibilities. This would appear to demand patient dedication over many weeks of regular play. This is quite a personal endeavor, and while I love to play socially, I might get even more out of the solitary pursuit of advancement through the various courses and levels and characters which define the experience of Mario Kart.


Wheel by steveyb on Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license

I also feel motivated to understand the game, the console, and the wider context of gaming not just as an ordinary player but also as a media scholar. I know a bit about games already from having taught video-game-related topics in various capacities as a quick-learn non-expert. I have to do this all the time in my teaching, as when I cover topics like media effects theories and the history of advertising. Much of my experience of teaching undergrads has been one of keeping a week or two ahead and hoping nobody notices the gaps in my knowledge.

But now I worry that I might want to become a scholar of games. Mario, for instance, seems like a perfect topic for in-depth research on media franchising, global flows of capital and content, game texts as narratives, and the history of game design. I think, someone ought to study that! Maybe someone has? I don’t know, but now I sort of want to.


Yeah, on a t-shirt.

Which brings me to the title of this post. Where do our ideas come from? I don’t mean just any ideas, but the ones we use in writing about film, television, video-games, websites, and whatever we study. Do they come from sitting under the idea tree and waiting for the fruit to fall? If not, then how do we select topics we want to research and know more about? In what ways is this systematic, organized, and logical, and to what extent do we simply follow our capricious trails of interests? Of course, this activity is bounded by social and scholarly conventions. I have to address topics I believe will interest the community of scholars, that will impress my colleagues and those who determine my tenure, etc. But whether I study American movies or television shows or Japanese video-games would seem to be largely up to me.


If I were a real gamer, I would know why this is funny.

My experience as a scholar until now has been marked by some shifts in my areas of interest. My PhD dissertation and the book I have been adapting from it are about American independent cinema. Since my dissertation I have written about prime-time television serials, web video series, the history of the concept of an “attention span” as it relates to American media, the cultural legitimation of television during the era of media convergence, and BitTorrent as a way of watching movies and TV. These topics were all products of specific experiences in my life. In some sense, then, my interests are dictated by my interests.


Pole Position was the last driving game I played regularly. I sucked at it.

I wanted to write about indie cinema because the films I was interested in analyzing had been important to me. I worked in an art house theater as a teenager, and after university I spent a lot of time at the Angelika and Lincoln Square theaters in NYC watching new American films. Movies like sex, lies, and videotape, Do the Right Thing, Reservoir Dogs, and Night On Earth made a big impression on me. They were a significant formative part of my life.

My interest in TV came from being married to a television scholar, but even more than that, I think, from being the parent of a young child. I was Leo’s primary caregiver during half of the working week when he very little, and I started recording shows to watch while he was playing in the living room late in the mornings when he was too young to care what was on screen. I watched the entire run of Judging Amy this way (except the final season) on cable reruns, which got me interested in studying the form of serialized television narratives. I suppose I could have been watching movies, but that regular installment of my favorite show filled that time especially well, developing into a habit. And I have always preferred to watch TV shows on TV and movies in theaters.


If we got these Tetris shelves, would my dreams of falling shapes return?

I have a story for each of my projects to explain where idea originally came from. They generally came from specific life experiences. Watching Sesame Street with Leo was part of what got me interested in the history of the attention span. The present phase of my life, being the parent of a five-year-old child, might push me in the direction of studying gaming. Part of me hopes it does not; I need to keep working on the projects I have already begun and I don’t feel like I have room for new ideas at the moment. It would take a while to read enough and play enough to feel competent to write about games. Sometimes the most exciting part of a research project is the initial enthusiasm of discovery, and this can make it appealing to launch into new areas of interest without recognizing the time commitment that will be involved. It’s dangerous under the idea tree, but the ubiquity of media makes it hard to find anyplace else to sit.


A Mario cake for your next birthday?

Playing Vids, quarterlife, In Treatment

In the process of preparing my lecture on videogames, I have been watching lots of videos of people playing games. These would make for an interesting study, I think, as a form of digital folk culture. They combine boastful, look-ma-no-hands virtuosity with the lo-fi authenticity and Vaudevillian exhibitionism of the YouTube aesthetic. They have certainly been enabled by the developments in gaming interfaces that make play more than just a matter of moving a joystick and hitting buttons, the same developments that are turning on the casual gamers who have been so important in driving up the industry's profits.

Gamers would seem to make these videos to satisfy various passions. The player who records his or her mastery of the expert level on Rock Band wants glory and posterity. One can imagine the fierce pride of the parents of the eight year-old sensations who shred out on Guitar Hero 2 and stomp in perfect rhythm playing Dance Dance Revolution. The angry players of Halo and its sequels are all over the tubes, screaming at their screens, validating the rage of anyone who ever got so invested in their own play.

In a related vein, there are the funniest-home-video qualities of flailing Wii Sports players whacking their imaginary tennis balls and rolling their virtual strikes and spares. And then there are the snapshot mementos of friends who gathered to sing along to American Idol Karaoke and to watch Grandma and Grandpa Wii boxing (searching YouTube for old and Wii turns up more than you can handle). We can picture ourselves twenty years on turning wistfully to these documents of the late oughts, laughing at the crummy Wii graphics no less than the overstuffed sectionals and 4X3 televisions and longing to play again.

***

Will we be watching quarterlife on NBC? You betcha. Although we have been "tuning in" online since the start, occasionally satisfied but more often kind of disappointed by the show (the best satisfaction comes in what will be the fourth TV episode, when the Angela Chase character hooks up with the Brian Krakow character--those who understand will understand), the question remains of how the show will look and feel as a weekly, hour-long NBC drama rather than a snack-sized web video series. I think it will play better as a TV show, and that it was supposed to be a TV show all along--that the internet was a gimmick for this show from the start. But the first few episodes are a rough beginning for the series and it might take a few months for it to find a good direction. I don't know that NBC will afford it that kind of patience.

***

In Treatment continues to impress, especially in its ability to shift so quickly from boring me to being captivating entertainment. I'm also impressed that every episode changes the show's look in some very subtle way, by giving us a new hairstyle or camera angle. If I get around to it I will make to framegrabs to illustrate what I mean. Last night's episode with Laura and Paul was intense at the end. The show has set up a fantastic pair of alternatives for these main characters: go for it, which would be wrong, or part ways, which would, in a way, be wronger. That's the kind of soapy plotting I was hoping for. Now HBO has a YouTube channel where they are streaming episodes, but only the first few for now.

If I Were An American Idol Judge

If I were an American Idol judge, my thing would be feeling and expressing the emotions of the song. I would be the one to say, when you sing “Groovy Kind of Love” it should sound sweet and groovy and when you sing “Happy Together” it should sound at once hopeful and a bit desperate. I should have a sense that you know and care what the lyrics are about. That’s why my first choice for guest judge would be Liza Minnelli. These kids need to be storytellers, not just belters and cuties. The best Idols of seasons past IMO—Ruben, Clay, Kimberly Locke, Fantasia, Taylor, Elliott, and Melinda—were the ones who could sell a song as an expression of their own passion. This is what makes a singer great more than pipes or panache. But these judges don’t seem to be paying attention to it. (My favorites this week, fwiw, were David for the boys, and Alexandréa for the girls.)

***

Elsewheres, The Watcher sez In Treatment is the best show on television right now. There ought to be a chart somewhere in the tubes showing which show each critic thinks is the best on TV right now.

I once would have said that Friday Night Lights is the best show on television, and now it's fighting for its life as NBC tries to find a network to share it with. I sort of don't care any more if it lives or dies.

Torontoist visits Hogtown's rep cinemas, many of them favorite places of mine from years past including Cinematheque Ontario, to see how they're faring in this digital age.

And next week I am teaching a subject I want to know more about: videogames. The readings I assigned are from Steven Poole's Trigger Happy, an excellent book available in its entirety for free at that link (we are reading chapters 2 and 8).