New Criticals


I am teaching the course this semester to about twenty undergraduates at Pitzer College. My public Internet writing here will also serve as their introduction to the many (un)networked locations of the course: hello! This will be my fifth (2007, 2008, 2010 and 2012) pedagogic interaction with YouTube's disorganized bonanza of what I earlier called slogans: "pithy, precise, rousing calls to action or consumption, or action as consumption." Each iteration of the class changes, as does YouTube and YouTube scholarship. Notably, there were books to teach about the subject published sometime after the 2007 class, including my own Learning from YouTube (MIT 2010). In the first class my undergrads were creating, not referencing, original critical Internet studies. Much of their strong work forms the content of my born-digital, free, online "video-book," itself an innovative work of critical Internet writing that experiments with shared-authorship and a focus upon pedagogy among other less common scholarly gestures.