No Man’s Blog

Video reactions are one of the most fascinating things on youtube. It’s a new form of dialouge, self-to-other expression platform which can take many forms and shapes depends on the context. I find this conversational form an anthropological goldmine. One video can spark a vast range of human communicative behaviours, from rant to praise, from empathy to nastiness, from mundane to artistic from daft to philosophical and more.

You can never predict what kind of response n a video can ignite, but this emergence of a micro, temporary, situational community where people gather around a shared object and publicly react to and converse with it (as well as with one another) is a wonderful demonstration of our social nature.

I come from a school of thought that argues that the individual self is social in origin and dialogical in function. The dialogical self reflects and appropriates the voices of society and significant others, and video reactions are wonderful examples of communicative actions between self and other.

Ever since I wrote this post I had this dream of having a massive screen in a public space for an arthropology (art+anthropology that is) installation of video response. That is probably a little bit too ambitious so with the very kind help of the magnificent Greg & Nico(you will be missed mate), I’m happy to present Reaction Wall - a permanent exhibition of human social interaction in modern, digital culture .

It’s a 3×3 wall of youtube videos with the central one (also marked with red frame) the piece that started the ‘videosation’.

I’m hoping to change the videos every couple of weeks or so and would welcome any contributions - if you know of an interesting video that sparked interesting reactions please drop me a line.

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