Youtube, Your Voice

-->

            For a democracy to function…citizens must actively engage in public debate, applying reading and writing practices in the service of articulating their positions and their critiques of the positions of others. To have citizens who are unable to write and read for the public forum thus defeats the central purpose of the notion of democracy. (Berlin “Rhetorics” 109-10)

            Most of my assignments in this half of the semester have to do with changes to the public forum. To be civically empowered, students must be able to navigate and create in the interconnected multimedia environment of the web. Mashable declared 2012 to be the year of Youtube, where 7,000 hours of news-related video was uploaded daily. If students want a voice in today’s media landscape, they need to be able to do more than write a letter to the editor. They need to be able to articulate an argument in a multimodal fashion.

            My basic writing students are passionately committed to wanting to improve their city. Most believe the answer lies in targeting the youth – the youth who are discarding their education and pursuing a lifestyle fueled by drugs and money. Reaching today’s youth will not be achieved through letters to the editor. To reach the broader demographic needed to make change, our students need to go through the channels of social media and Youtube.

            After spring break, my English 090 students are going to create their first digital stories, a collection of personal testimonies regarding violence in Saginaw. They will be personal and driven by narrative elements, as this will anchor the unfamiliar video components in mode of storytelling they are comfortable with. Honestly, having done my first testimonial video on the topic of urban violence, I can say it is a more raw and powerful way to tell a story. Writing allows for a bit of distance, in fact distance is necessary to achieve perspective and reflection. However, the sound of your own voice reading the story and the images of real places and people removes the distance. The story becomes more immediate, the pathos stronger. Multimodal storytelling has more affective bandwidth – it’s able to convey more, faster.

While I’ve done a lot of video editing and remixes and mashups, this is my first personal digital story. Somehow that makes it seem less polished and more earnest. It makes me uncomfortable, and I take this to be a good sign: