Development Cooperation Handbook/The video resources linked to this handbook/The Documentary Story/The wonders of YouTube channel

The wonders of YouTube channel (and of social networks)

As the work was in progress the team continued to upload the videos on our YouTube channel. Which gradually became more and more numerous.

On the side of the “quantity” we were quickly demonstrating the results of our work. And this was helping us to easily satisfy the formal requirement of our contract with the EU Commission. The choice of broadcasting through Internet was proving a cheap and efficacious way to share the knowledge we were collecting.

But, of course, simply publishing videos in the channel repertory was not sufficient. We had to find a way for presenting the videos in a logical structure. Separate interviews and separate projects do not make a story.

The WIKI had helped us to organize the different videos in the "issues" pages where it was possible to compare the different opinions of different stakeholders from different cultural background. But the WIKI was not giving was a sense of ongoing activity. In fact the WIKI appears as a sort of library, where new and old books get collected without a chronological order. You can use the WIKI tools to find out the latest additions. But that is something for experts. We needed some sort of window where the work was being presented in a sequential order, with the latest additions on the top, while giving a sense of work in progress.

We first started using a blog. But it never worked well. The blog in itself creates a different web site and it was becoming a sort of duplication with the wiki without a clear understanding of why two web sites are needed and what is the difference amongst them. Finally we abandoned the blog altogether.

The solution for came with a Facebook page. We could add in Facebook the links either to the videos, or to the playlists or to the WIKI page, without losing a sense of unitary progression. Trough Facebook it became possible to mobilize the support of those who were supporting our project, who helped in disseminating the information by sharing the link to the Facebook page on their own network of friends and groups. So the videos started being shared even before we had used them for our planned documentary. It was a very different way of using internet that the one that is mainly being used by the broadcasting companies which simply publish in the Internet only the material after is being aired in the television. And they use the same material, repeating it on the web, as a sort of smaller screen useful for replay the contents in case you were not in front of the TV at the time the real thing was aired.

The interaction between internet and TV however massive in its traffic is still at a very initial stage in its logic and I think there are a lot of unexplored opportunities. Now there is redundancy or competition. But a different approach is possible. Different media could enable each other, dialogue with each other, synergy, cooperate. What we tried to do in Internet between the written WIKI pages, the social media,Youtube, and then the television outputs and the printed books was to create a unitary event, where the different media have something peculiar to add on , where are all necessary to create the intended communication event, made possible only by different media interaction. As in a sort of concert that has different music instruments, and singers, and dancers, and stage designers, and light managers ... but a unitary composition.

On another hand the internet channel allowed us to bypass the filters of information gatekeepers. And it has allowed us to get users participation to the preparation of the media products.

Two years later when observing the analytic of YouTube I found that among the 10 videos most viewed in videos on our YouTube channel there was a certain Dilip Kumar and a certain Kabir. I had not through these interviews at all; however they were amongst the most viewed? Who were them? I t turned out that one was one of the partners of Dilip Kumar in the Jharkhand project, the other was the principle of the Rajghat School of the Krishnamurti Foundation story. They were both interviewed in Hindi on many issues but only a flash statement was used in the edited story. Still, in a mysterious way, they had been found by the internet viewers and were promoted virally. The power of the net! So went to listen to them carefully! They were good! They need to be given more space in the edited stories and in the online manuals. Thanks net community for telling us the value of something that it had skipped our notice!

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