It's like reality TV for famous filmmakers: wacky games with ridiculous rules bring out the real man. In this episode, our intrepid directors don't have to eat maggots but they do have to shoot almost an entire feature film within the tight, murky confines of a cave. There's no vistas...

Given that it's free, I hope you'll check out my "video-book," just released from the MIT Press.

It's a great resource for teaching YouTube, given that it's written to an ADHD reader in the vernaculars of online: tweets and videos suggest that long-form learning may be...

Duration is a hallmark of experimental media practices. While always boring, to some extent, great duration works depend upon a profound mirroring of technique and ontology to allow us to ruminate on definitive questions of both cinema and existence: desire and boredom, what lasts and what we will wait for.

I've been mulling over both my take and my stake in regards to the Rally to Restore Sanity and the recent and related Tea Party March on Washington, not to mention yesterday's Republican and Tea Party (voting) rallies that led to their re-taking of the House. In all cases,...

The Guggenheim Museum just released its list of the twenty-five best videos on YouTube, selected from 23,000 entries, and now the celebrated objects off-line and on, of YouTube Play, a screening site on YouTube and at the Museum.

While Catfish presents as a convincingly real fake-documentary (currently awaiting its BIG reveal), I'd suggest that it is even more interesting to think about this already interesting work as a horror film. In Men, Women, and Chainsaws, Carol Clover carefully draws out the unsettling binaries that create...

In my previous post on The Social Network, I suggested that Facebook's (i.e. Mark Zuckerberg and Co.'s) pricey (minimum cost, $100-million dollars... to needy Jersey schools that is) and highly orchestrated public relations blitz now playing across the mediascape at exactly the moment of a slanderous mainstream narrative...

I've written extensively here and on my blog, Media Praxis, about the mis-steps of the usually celebrated terrain of media convergence: the too easy, sloppy, ill-conceived contemporary media moves across platforms and between documentary, fiction, and hybrid back again. To my mind, Social Network is a textbook...

I watched Ang Lee's 2009 "Taking Woodstock" a few night ago, but couldn't keep the real "Woodstock" (movie) out of my mind's eye. I'm a big fan of Lee and his producer (and screenwriter), Focus Feature's James Schamus, so it was hard for me to not like this film.

It came as no surprise to me when Casey Affleck at long last spilled the beans: that his tawdry expose of Joaquin Phoenix's bad-boy decent into star-boy-debauchery was, in fact, a nearly two-year performance piece, culminating in a premier at Venice, Joaquin's triumphantly skinny return to the red...

I was recently interviewed by Time magazine about the phenomenon of Tosh.0. Once again, my YouTube studies lead me to pop-analysis of cultural phenomena I had otherwise studiously avoided. But I watched, and pontificated, and is the case in such situations, the journalist used what she needed but did...

My last post skirted the issue, saying I was "too busy" to perform my professorial labors properly: the hard work of "unpacking" lady Gaga. Ha. I'd actually taught the video to my under-grads, read and responded to helpful blogs by several of my favorite

"Mommies are people. People with children. When mommies were little they used to be kids, like some of you, but then they grew, and now mommies are women: women with children. Busy with children and things that they do, there are a lot of things, a lot of mommies can...

I liked Exit Through the Gift Shop well enough. Its bad-boy, Euro-trash pranksters bite their thumbs at the art-world that feeds them by playfully manufacturing a hoax-star doppleganger forger from thin air, then selling his misbegotten wares for millions: gotcha! But really, guys, Orson Welles did it...

In The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, Elif Batuman succeeds at the almost impossible: the Professor-written, trade-press, paper-back of the otherwise undecipherable dissertation. As is true for much of the work I admire, and try to emulate, The Possessed makes its arguments about form...

You could say I "read" David Shield's Reality Hunger yesterday, but as my first nod to the worthy successes (and ballsy failures) of his argument-through-form, I actually skimmed it in less than an hour. As is true of any good manifesto, he clocks or locks a feeling in the air,...

Let's imagine that you hadn't, or couldn't, or didn't want to go to college, but you went to HuffPost College instead. In a world where more and more people can't afford higher education but can access the internet, this thought-game is not as lame as it might first appear. Asking...

This post provides some context to understand the thinking behind and learning from my 2007 Media Studies course, Learning from YouTube, recently featured in the "coolest college courses" slideshow on this page.

In this 2009 essay, "Learning the Five Lessons of YouTube: After Trying to Teach...

This post provides some context to understand the thinking behind and learning from my 2007 Media Studies course, Learning from YouTube, recently featured in the "coolest college courses" slideshow on this page.

While I was teaching Learning from YouTube in 2007, I was also blogging about...