Code, Camera, Action

On Earth Day, 1971, a nonprofit called Keep America Beautiful launched TV ads to persuade people to stop littering.

If you grew up watching Saturday morning cartoons in the '70s, you'll remember them.

Each one featured an American Indian paddling or riding or walking through a trashy landscape and a grave voice over, ending with "People start polution. People can stop it." At the end of each ad, the camera zooms in on the Indian's face, onto a single tear.

The crying Indian got America to stop littering.

That ad is the one I remember most.

Do watch it. Then forgive me a guess about what you're thinking: Powerful TV, but really.

Of course, the '70s were top-down times. One example: Elvis Presley, master of media, had three TVs built into the wall of this basement at Graceland. Three televisions were all he needed to watch everything shown on TV in America. There were only three channels, so The King was set.

The Indian in the ads was a career actor named Iron Eyes Cody. He became known as The Crying Indian -- better known for those ads than for any other role in in his career, which began when he was 12. While Iron Eyes lived his life as an Indian, Wikipedia says he was born Italian-American, from Louisiana.

And there are all sorts of conspiratorial accusations against Keep America Beautiful. The organization purportedly got its funding from corporations and fast-food vendors. Wouldn't it be better, the accusers say, to encourage people to buy less styrofoam than to clean up litter?

Yet the ads inspired genuine feeling. And people did (mostly) stop littering. A mark of their power today: their YouTube comments are mostly positive.

What's the Crying Indian for our time? And, post-network-TV, what's the medium? The net, surely -- but which net? A thousand blogs? Twitter? Facebook? YouTube? (And do all the brand names in that list creep anybody out, is it just me?)

I want to know what kind of campaign it would take to stop pollution -- really stop it.

People start pollution. People can stop it.

But how?

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A YouTube study of UK audience demographics and clickstreams says YouTube complements existing TV audiences.

• YouTube's weekly reach (34%) is comparable to major TV channels in the UK such as SkyOne
• Weekly reach is higher amongst certain target audiences, such as affluent young males (54%)
• YouTube users (particularly heavy YouTube users) are more likely to be light TV viewers than average

via google.com

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What we are encountering is a panicky, an almost hysterical, attempt to escape from the deadly anonymity of modern life... and the prime cause is not vanity... but the craving of people who feel their personality sinking lower and lower into the whirl of indistinguishable atoms to be lost in a mass civilization. -- Henry Seidel Canby, 1926

At the Personal Democracy Forum, Kansas State University Professor Michael Wesch presented "The Machine is (Changing) Us: YouTube Culture and the Politics of Authenticity", which looks at how YouTube is changing the way we connect to one another. Jordan Raynor's post has the best summary (with some video) I've found.

Wesch starts with traditional TV.  When the conversation is on TV, you have to be on TV to have a voice, have to be on TV to be significant.

• All this media -- billions of dollars, brilliant people -- all for me. It's flattering 
• One of the sources of "Generation Me" by Jean M Twenge. 

YouTube, in contrast, offers the possibility of "connection without constraint".

• Free Hugs video
• The Message: Word on your hand campaign

Each of these collaborations has had thousands of remakes and remixes, even parodies.

Which brings to video conversation. Revelations here are public, yet beyond what we would say to our closest friends.

For all its emotional power, though, video blogging has not yet taken off. Seesmic, the highest profile of the video discussion sites, has not grown the way its founder had hoped. From a user standpoint, discovery is a problem. If the contents of these videos were searchable, might we find more of them?  Right now there's no way to scan a video at, say, double time, and no transcription of the audio. Technology will eventually fix these shortcomings, of course.  But will we be ready?  

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