fearroyo on Video Vortex

In Thomas Elsaesser’s article “’Constructive Instability’, or: the Life of Things as the Cinema’s Afterlife?” he brings up the idea of a constructive instability as the progression of recent self-sustaining media systems (that develop from user-generated content) of intricate of algorithms that seem to provide an endless portal of access to user-generated and commercial content.

Lev Manovich’s “The Practice of Everday (Media) Life” focuses more on the proliferation of using online video sites through commercial strategy and user tactics to adapt and alter the commercial strategies meant to sell the user products through the popular medium of online marketing (social networking, and online video blogs).

Elsaesser’s argument mostly concerns itself with establishing that with the advent and availability of cheaper and effective technologies available to the general public, there is a considerable amount (an average of a 1% of the total online video community) that contributes to posting their user-generated content. His approach appears to encompass a more chaotic thermodynamic description of the new mode of copying and altering commercial property and art to suit the needs of the viewers and consumers. Constructive instability refers to the inevitable tendency for systematic operations to fall apart after time, but in the meantime these self-sustained systems feeding off of information through algorithms from online human behavior are able to produce search results for viewers to access desired content.

Manovich takes two critical components from De Certeau’s tactics and strategies both deployed differently depending on the circumstances of user-generated content versus that of commercial content. There is still an apparent attempt by marketing research firms to collect information and employ strategies meant to obtain information from online users, the users in turn use their human tactics to negotiate and manipulate commercial incentives to suit their needs. The issue of marketing in new untapped spaces towards new consumer pools is the main cause of concern with the evolution of the Web 2.0 that Manovich describes throughout the article.