Mark C. Marino wanted to respond to a scholar’s video that was causing a buzz on YouTube. So he made a video of his own, remixing the original as a critique. The dueling videos might point to a future in which scholarly arguments take place in visual rather than written form.
The four-and-a-half-minute video that sparked the discussion was produced by Michael L. Wesch and the 200 students in his cultural-anthropology class at Kansas State University (which we wrote about back in October). The work presents startling statistics about college life; students hold up signs that read, “I bring my laptop to class, but I’m not working on class stuff,” “I spend 2 hours on my cellphone” per day, and “I will be $20,000 in debt after graduation.” The statistics were drawn from a survey of the 200 class members—a small sample for a video titled “A Vision of Students Today.”
UPDATE