Duncum (2014), Youth on Youtube Smart Swarms

Viewing YouTube culture as a creative, collaborative process similar to animal swarms can help art educators understand and embrace youth's digital practices.

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mart Swarms |chooi-age youth are among the most prolific contributors to YouTube, not just as viewers but also as producers (Stangelove, 2010); according to YouTube, (2012) at the time of writing 72 hours of video were uploaded every single minuteJ This equates to about 100 years every single day. Yet YouTube is only one example^ of how youth are operating online to create what many call a participatory culture (Jenkins, Purushotma, Weigel, Clinton, & Robison, 2009), a remix culture (Lessig, 2008), or a mashup culture, in which youth, operating collectively, combine existing material to produce their own work (Sonvilla-Weiss, 2010). In collectively creating this culture, youth are employing what is variously called "distributed cognition" (Jenkins et al, 2009, p. 70), "collective intelligence" (Levy, 1997),"distributed creativity" (Bruns, 2010, p. 24), and "participatory creativity" (Vaden & Varto, 2010, p. 239). Reflecting the remix, mashup nature of this emerging online culture it is often described by use of portmanteaus. For example. Bruns (2010) calls the videos produsage, a contraction of produce and usage, in which youth operate collectively by using the productions of others to produce their own creations. Youth operate as informal, afñnity-based learning communities, drawn temporarily together through shared passions. Even preschoolers now produce videos (McClure, 2010). So

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pervasive, complex, rapidly moving, and starkly different from institutional schooling is this participatory, online culture that it offers major challenges to educators.

with new technologies, but I argue that they offer powerful albeit partial metaphors to appreciate just how pervasive a social contagion YouTube has become.

Based on the assumption that the flrst step in learning how to engage with this culture is to understand how it operates, I apply Miller's (2010) theory of smart swarms. Wisdom drawn from bee, ant, and termite colonies, bird flocks, and fish schools may initially seem utterly unrelated to human behavior intersecting

I am especially focused on videos that youth produce in their own time of their own volition. There are many kinds, including short narratives enacted with toys such as Barbie, Lego motion, rants to camera, karaoke performances, comedy sketches, mashups from favorite movies such as Twilight and Star Wars where the heroes

of one film battle the villains of another, mashups where the visual track of one movie is overlaid with the audio track of another movie, movie-in-minutes where a full-length feature is retold in a few key elements, and mashups that sometimes involve 30 or more original music videos. Additionally, there are numerous hybrids so that a narrative involving Barbie might consist of animation, live people, and a commercial song. There are so many genres, subgenres, and hybrids that, following Deleuze and Guattari (1987), it is best to conceptualize the relationship between these many forms as rhizomatic, a conventional mapping being impossible. Art educator Manifold (2009) claims youth's collaborative, participatory culture is not only creative, it also plays important developmental functions. It represents a space in which to develop identity in terms of self-eñicacy; exercise curiosity; meet challenges; attain public recognition; and enable social interaction and support from like-minded, similarly focused peers. And art educators Ivashkevich and Shoppell (2012) argue that video production allows youth to act as writers, producers, directors, actors, and editors to enact multiple identities and make decisions about their self-representations.

Youth as Smart Swarms Millers theory of smart swarms pulls together into a consistent set of principles what others have described less systematically (e.g., Jenkins et al, 2009; Strangelove, 2010). It also underpins the resilience of the principles of networking and by implication that what young people are now doing on YouTube represents a major shift of behavior and consciousness rather than a passing fad. YouTube itself may pass, but the general principles on which its success is founded are unlikely to pass anytime soon; in the wild the principles are millions of years old. Miller (2010) draws on complexity theory and leverages many scientific studies on bee, ant, and termite colonies, bird flocks, and fish schools to demonstrate that these creatures act better in consort than when acting alone. Moreover, he argues that when humans follow the principles on which these creatures operate as swarms, humans too operate far better than when acting individually. Bees, ants, and so on do not need to be smart

because as a swarm they are smart. Humans who follow the same basic principles of group behavior are similarly enabled to act in ways that areflexible,adaptable, and reliable.' In each case "the wisdom of crowds" trumps the expert knowledge of the few in making good choices (p. 44). Miller proposes four principles on which smart swarms operate.

1. Decentralized Control First, smart swarms are based on selforganization, which, in turn, consists of "decentralized control, distributed problem solving, and multiple interactions" (Miller, p. 10). By such means members of a group are able to transform simple rules into meaningful patterns, and this is possible even when members of a group have no idea about the form their individual contributions make. Termites, for example, are able to build huge mounds many times larger than themselves by foflowing the rule of dropping a grain of soil where another termite has already done so. Similarly, with YouTube, working independently with no one in overall control, individuals and small groups upload their videos by simply following the lead of others. Consider for example how videos employing just one particular toy spark others. Barbie videos include: Barbie Torture, Barbie Lego, Gay Barbie, and Gossip Girl Barbie. In turn, these videos cross over to videos with titles such as Gossip Girl Parody, Gossip Girl Lego, Gossip Girl Finger Puppets, and so on."* A further connection between selforganizing animals and YouTube relates to sustainability over the long haul. Some species of birdsflyfor lengthy periods of time over vast distances, and this is enabled by two processes: following the lead of others and regularly changing who leads. Most birds in aflockflyin the slip-steam created by birds in front of them, and the birds in the lead, who must work harder against the resistance of the air, are replaced by other birds when the lead birds tire. Similarly, most videos on YouTube appear inspired by others; mostly, producers appear to model their videos on others' videos, and only a relatively few lead the way, but who leads the way is forever changing. Through such self-regulation both flocks of birds and youth on YouTube are self-sustaining. Producers of Barbie torture videos move

on to other interests, but there appear plenty of others ready to fill their place.

2. Diversity of Knowledge Secondly, smart swarms employ diversity of knowledge, which is achieved through a broad sampling of options, the encouragement of friendly competition, followed by an effective mechanism to narrow down choices. Together, these processes help ensure that the best choice is the one most likely to be made. For example, honeybees select a site for a new home through representative bees sampling several potential sites, communicating their findings to the whole hive, and then the whole hive deciding through what is effectively a democratic voting system. Apparently, they communicate by how they "dance." YouTube similarly offers youth numerous diverse models to sample as well as extensive and often conflicting feedback from third parties on what they consider successful, though not all comments on YouTube are friendly. For example, of one video called Barbie Torture by torturebarbie, comments were mostly negative. They included, "Where is the point of this. Get a life." "You should have done that with a live human... then maybe we'd be interested." "Wow you cut of her foot omg so brilliant (Sarcazm)." But more commonly, comments are positive. Barbie Torture Device by mommarina, in which a self-identified 4th-grade boy demonstrates how his Erecter set mechanism is set to torture Barbie received comments including, "Holy shiz HI boy that's awesome." "Ur mad and twisted, like me." "Twisted evil kid. Awesome!" According to YouTube (2012), videos receive 10 likes to every one dislike. Yet whether reception is positive or negative all producers are in fierce competition with others for viewers and so it behooves producers to make their video as arresting and as technically sophisticated as they can; the feedback offers guidance for what works and how to improve in the marketplace of popular appeal. YouTube offers an unmanageably large number of options. But like the mechanism the bees use to decide on their future habitat, the YouTube interface operates as a very effective mechanism to narrow down choices likely to be of most interest to would-be producers. Apart from the video itself, the

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Teachers should make it clear to students that using YouTube as a form of self-expression was never its intended primary function.... YouTube is a traditional marketing tool, its only major innovation being to use user-generated material to attract eyeballs to advertising. interface includes the video's name, the name of its producer(s), a tag line briefly describing the video, the date the video was uploaded, the number of visits, the number of visitors who have commented, and the tally of the comments classified as "likes" and "dislikes." All the comments are available to be viewed, and these oftentimes include interaction between the creators and their commentators. All of this information acts as a guide to popularity and by extension whether it is worth spending a few minutes watching. In this way would-be producers have readily available a range of opinion on what works and what does not. Additionally, the YouTube platform oners thumbnails of videos selected on the basis of a viewer's previous viewing habits. Anyone interested in one genre will immediately have available other, previous efforts to view and build upon. And for anyone interested in the oeuvre of a particular producer, there is a hyperlink to all of his or her videos.

3. Indirect Collaboration Indirect collaboration involves individuals making small changes to an existing, shared system that inspires others to make further changes so that the system itself appears to be a participant. It is as though self-organizing systems actually have a life of their own, operating independently of any one member or group. No one directs a termite to drop a grain of soil where another has, yet it is by acting on this shared impulse that termites build their huge mounds; in a sense, the mounds are "an active player in the creative process" (Miller, 2010, p. 121). Youth on YouTube are self-motivated and work independently, but together they constantly add to the previous efforts of others in a way that has created much more than the generic

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site for uploading amateur videos. Having migrated from a noun to an adjective as in "YouTube election," and then to a verb as in "YouTube it," YouTube is now a major social space in its own right (Strangelove, 2010, p. 5). By working independently but interactively, youth have helped create a phenomenon that now operates in 43 countries in 60 languages, and in 2011 attracted more than 1 trillion viewers, which is 140 views for every person on the planet (YouTube, 2012). When YouTube began in 2005, who could have foreseen what a complex, socially significant operation it would so quickly become?

4. Adaptive Mimicking Adaptive mimicking involves coordination, communication, and copying, and it refers "to the way individuals in a group pay close attention to one another, picking up signals about where they're going and what they know" (Miller, 2010, p. 163). Adaptive mimicking is capable of unleashing powerful waves of energy that race from one individual to another. In the wild, flocks of birds appear to act as if they were of one mind as seemingly all at once they turn, bank, dive, scatter, and so on. Erom the research Miller cites, we now know that they actually communicate from bird to bird, but so fast it eludes the human eye. Similarly, like the Internet generally, YouTube facilitates rapid, many-to-many, viral communications. On YouTube as in the wild, adaptive mimicking is characterized by the efficiency of astonishing speed. The feedback loop is almost immediate. Moreover, it is now known that individual birds in a flock or individual fish in a school do not communicate with everyone but only about seven other creatures with whom they are in close proximity. This too

is analogous to the way users on YouTube operate. "[P]aying close attention to others can become a powerful source of collective intelligence" (Miller, 2010, p. 179). Instead of communicating with the entire population of YouTube users—an impossible task—users limit themselves to a far smaller number. Eor a video to become viral and be seen by millions within days, initially it only needs to be viewed by a limited number of people: for example, seven people know 49, who know 349, who know 2,401, who know 16, 807, who know 117,649, who know just over a million, and so on. In practice, youth on social networking sites are typically connected to many more than seven people so that a video can go viral, literally overnight. Additionally, it only needs a few people to turn a video into numerous mutations as a video inspires parodies, which, in turn, inspires parodies of the parodies, and so on (Strangelove, 2010). In the wild what Miller calls copying is mostly exact replication. By contrast, copying on YouTube videos is more akin to modeling than replication. The smart swarm metaphor is only partial because youth do not entirely act as smart swarms. Producers invariably replicate only some features of another video, leaving out others and introducing their own. Continuing to employ the biological metaphor, copying equates to mutation or variation. As self-organized groups, humans are far more complex than bees, ants, termites, birds, and fish, which means that humans do not act entirely like these creatures as swarms. Human systems are far less predictable. Meadows (2008) argues that self-organizing, nonlinear systems raise as many questions as they settle. Eor example, he asks, "Why do people actively

sort and screen information in the way they do? How do they determine what to let in and what to bounce off, what to reckon with and what to ignore or disparage?" (p. 169). That youth on YouTube are unpredictable can be taken as axiomatic. Some videos lie dormant for a year or more before going viral. Who can say at any one time what will take ofl^ and what will not, let alone why?

The Downside Miller concludes his description of smart swarms by pointing to two negatives. Ants, for example, can sometimes get turned around and go the wrong way, and smart swarms are not always smart. Consider the damage locusts can rend when they swarm. Similarly among humans, crowds are not always wise; they can turn into irrational mobs. Blindly following the herd has often proved catastrophic. Self-organized groups that leverage distributed knowledge, indirect collaboration, and adaptive mimicking are not necessarily healthy. Youth on YouTube are not always inventive or even the least bit interesting. For all their knowledge of popular culture and tech smarts, youth are prone to peer pressure, vulnerable to the hedonism of commercial culture, and by any standards many of their videos are talentless, inane, and offensive. It is easy to dismiss them as narcissistic, a waste of time.

Educational Interventions However, I propose that both the power and the limitations of youth on YouTube acting as smart swarms offer art education extraordinary opportunities. As Reilly (2010) argues, "Our relationship with students is to offer guidance, establish mutually agreed upon norms in the classroom, and provide learning goals to accomplish. It is not about providing all the answers or giving specific directions..." (p. 159). In short, teachers have a role to play. Specifically, I propose that teachers embrace youth's friendship and interestdriven informal ways of learning by seeing YouTube and similar vehicles as creative venues. If institutional education is to remain relevant we must first acknowledge that we have entered upon a very different world in which informal learning communities are now a major part of our students'

lives. They represent nothing less than a paradigm shift in education. We must acknowledge that students now come to us with the expectation of being able to employ their own agency in exploring the world they are to inherit and change. A first small, and manageable, step in this direction is for teachers to shift their typical attention from still and static images to time-based media. While youth's videos often reward with their outrageous humor and insights, and many delight with the irrepressibility of young people to create fresh perspectives on their own media saturated world, many lack even rudimentary skills (Ivashkevich & Shoppell, 2013). Youth often appear to look through viewfinders as they do in real life, not in terms of composing images for optimal communication. Teachers need to guide students in the use of framing, points-ofview, editing, the blocking of figures, types of focus, camera movements, and so on, in order to help students better articulate their intentions. YouTube itself öfters tutorials.' A second step could be to create videos inspired by YouTube genre, but then go beyond using YouTube as a dumping ground for class projects. Once their videos are downloaded, students could respond to the critique they garner from viewers with their own comments and/or further productions. This would be to transform the typically closed classroom into a site of social networking linked to the creative energy of youth culture. It might even be possible to use the feedback by the students' anonymous peers to assess student work. A third step would be to attempt to reconcile the hedonism and inanity of youth culture with the rationality expected of formal schooling. Teachers would need to draw up rules of engagement so that transgressive, offensive material is either censored or becomes the focus of discussion. Either way, a pedagogy of playfulness rather than one of preemptive criticism needs to be embraced (Duncum, 2009). Otherwise, by seeming to criticize youth culture from the outset rather than to subject it to open discussion, teachers would merely reinforce the separation between student culture and teacher culture.

Fourth, teachers should make it clear to students that using YouTube as a form of selfexpression was never its intended primary function. From an economic perspective, YouTube is a traditional marketing tool, its only major innovation being to use user-generated material to attract eyeballs to advertising. From this perspective it might be considered exploitive of youth (Strangelove, 2010). To employ YouTube is therefore inherently to acknowledge the power of commercial interests and the ambiguities this brings to one of the primary educational tasks: producing citizens prepared to reject the unfettered hedonism of the marketplace and embrace a sense of collective responsibility (Duncum, 2006). Yet notwithstanding the insidious commercial reality of YouTube, youth on YouTube appear to operate to a large extent according to principles of smart swarms that have evolved over millions of years to deal with uncertainty, complexity, and change. It is important that we find ways to interact with youth as smart swarms because many predict that YouTube is merely a harbinger of things to come (Strangelove, 2010). Paul Duncum is Professor of Art Education and Visual Culture at University of Illinois, Champaign Urbana. E-mail: [email protected]

ENDNOTES 1 August 2012. 2 See Hanes, I. M., & Weisman, E. (2010). LEGO Brick as pixal: Self, community, and digital communication. Journal of Social Theory in Art Education, 31. Retrieved from www.bluedoublewide. com/opnjuranl/index.php/jstae/index 3 Miller mentions such real-world applications of smart swarm principles involving humans include new CIA intelligence gathering and analysis methods, business enterprises, and town haU meetings. 4 These specific titles were available at the time of writing but videos are constantly deleted so searches should begin with "Barbie torture" to find what is available at any one time. 5 For example, How to Make a Youtube Video part 1. Available at: www.youtube. com/watch?v=Hsuy4cUJe9o

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REFERENCES Bruns, A. (2010). Distributed creativity: Filesharing and produsage. In S. Sonvilla-Weiss (Ed.), Mashup cultures (pp. 24-37). New York, NY: Springer. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, R (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. (B. Massumi, Trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Duncum, P. (2009). Toward a playful pedagogy: Popular culture and the pleasures of transgression. Studies in art Education, 50(3), 232-244. Duncum, P (2006). Challenges to art education from visual culture studies. In T. Hardy (Ed.), Art education in a postmodern world (pp. 99-112). Bristol, England: Intellect Books. Ivashkevich, O., & Shoppell, S. (2012) Appropriation, parody, gender play, and self-representation in preadolescent's digital video production. International journal of Education & the Arts, 134(2). Retrieved from www.ijea.org/vl4n2

Jenkins, H., Purushotma, R., Weigel, M., Clinton, K., Robison, A. J. (2009). Confronting the challenges of participatory culture: Media education for the 21st century. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Lessig, L. (2008). Remix: Making art and commerce thrive in the hybrid economy. New York, NY: Penguin Press. Levy, P (1997). Collective intelligence: Mankind's emerging world in cyberspace. (R. Bononno, Trans.). New York, NY: Plenum Trade. Manifold, M. (2009). What art educators can learn from the fan-based artmaking of adolescents and young adults. Studies in Art Education, 50(3), 257-271.

McClure, M. (2010). Digital visual childhood: Preschoolers and the new narratives of digital video in the blogosphere. In R. W. Sweeny (Ed.), ¡nter/Actions/Inter/Sections: Art education in a digital visual culture (pp. 20-29). Reston, VA: National Art Education Association.

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Meadows, D. H. (2008). Thinking in systems: A primer White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green.

Vaden, T., & Varto, I. (2010). Tepidity and the majority and participatory creativity. In S. Sonvilla-Weiss (Ed.). Mashup cultures (pp. 239-253).

Miller, P. (2010). The smart swarm: How understanding flocks, schools and colonies can make us better at communicating, decision making, and getting things done. New York, NY: Avery.

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New York, NY: SpringerWein.

Reilly, E. B. (2010). Remix culture: Digital music and video remix, opportunities for creative production. In I. K. Parker (Ed.), Teaching tech-savvy kids: Bringing digital media into the classroom, grades 5-12 (pp. U3-166). London, England: Sage.

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