Home Mode, Community Mode, Counter Mode: Three Functional Modalities for Coming to Terms with Amateur Media Practices

Slootweg, Tom

doi:10.5040/9781501333262.ch-012

Cited by 3 publications

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“…This is particularly relevant when taking into consideration the variety of perspectives on media amateurs found among the sources and historical actors discussed in the second part of the chapter. Elsewhere, for example, Slootweg proposed the discerning between three, sometimes overlapping, modes of practice and functioning: the community mode, counter mode, and home mode (Slootweg 2018a). As Motrescu-Mayes and Aasman furthermore pointed out, "the counter mode, represented by social and political activists who embraced video as an oppositional practice, the home mode, driven by a desire to use video as a technology of memory, and the community mode, presented by self-proclaimed serious organized film amateurs" (Motrescu-Mayes and Aasman 2019, 16-17).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Amateurism

Aasman¹,

Heijden²,

Slootweg³

2021

Digital Roots

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Amateurism

Aasman¹,

Heijden²,

Slootweg³

2021

Digital Roots

Self Cite

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“…As Tom Slootweg demonstrated in his research on the introduction of amateur video, there are basically three amateur modes representing the rich diversity in practices and functions among historical film and video amateurs, namely the home mode (mainly used to describe a memory practice within a more private and domestic context), the community mode (mainly used for delineating serious hobbyist who are well organized in film or video clubs) and the counter mode (referring to a more ideological perspective indicating film and video makers embracing amateur equipment as something that can offer tools to resist institutionalized media and/or politics). 5 Although these modes offer a heuristic to think about amateurism beyond a more normative approach, it leaves the question open as to how flexible these functional modalities are in the present era of digital media where a complex combination of technological, social, political, economic and cultural changes take place. For instance, can we still speak about the home mode when we analyse family vlogs uploaded on a public platform like YouTube?…”

Section: Amateur Media Historymentioning

confidence: 99%

Finding Traces in YouTube’s Living Archive: Exploring Informal Archival Practices

Aasman

2019

TMG

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This article addresses the challenges that media historians face when they aim to reconstruct the early history of YouTube. Since the platform is constantly adapting its policies, there is a great level of uncertainty as to what is still there or what is no longer traceable. Therefore, addressing the question if and/or how YouTube can be understood as an archive is crucial and, in addition, the issue of how YouTube related content can be used as historical sources. Although many people, including media scholars, treat YouTube like an online open access archive, there are reasons to be cautious. The article will explore strategies dealing with formal but also with informal web archival practices. These informal archival practices concern users who curate early YouTube videos, user profiles and comments or even old layout versions of the website. Developing methods that critically acknowledges user-generated archival practices, and uses the insights of early generation of users' reconstructions of the platform's history, even if it might seem anecdotal evidence, can lead to deeper knowledge of that early community. By actively participating in reconstructing YouTube's recent past these users shape nostalgic narratives while they also collect and share useful information that guide historians finding new traces.

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(Auto)biographical Documentaries as Audiovisual Microhistories of Pinochet's Chile

Rosas-Salazar¹

2022

Iluminace

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Historians work with documents as sources to research the past and elaborate a narrative. This article proposes that documentary filmmakers perform a similar practice, excavating the past by working with audiovisual documents to produce a documentary film, thus allowing stories of anonymous people to emerge. I elaborate on historian Carlo Ginzburg's approach to microhistory and propose to study this type of documentary as audiovisual microhistories. That is to say, as an experimental practice that pays attention to small-scale research units to access previously unknown stories and explore how they interrelate with the wider historical context. Here, I analyze three Chilean documentaries that focus on the recontextualization of home videos produced during the late 1980s and the 1990s, covering events spanning from the end of General Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship to the transition to democracy: Story of my Name (Historia de mi Nombre, Karin Cuyul, 2019), Adriana's Pact (El Pacto de Adriana, Lissette Orozco, 2017), and Guerrero (Sebastián Moreno, 2017). To do so, I borrow historian Rudolf Dekker's notion of ego-documents and suggest that amateur videos work as first-hand testimonies that reveal the experiences of these anonymous people and their pasts.

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Home Mode, Community Mode, Counter Mode: Three Functional Modalities for Coming to Terms with Amateur Media Practices

Cited by 3 publications

References 0 publications

Amateurism

Amateurism

Finding Traces in YouTube’s Living Archive: Exploring Informal Archival Practices

(Auto)biographical Documentaries as Audiovisual Microhistories of Pinochet's Chile

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