If you are a cultural anthropologist you’re probably quite familiar with the term ethnography, it’s a genre of writing that uses fieldwork to provide a descriptive study of human societies.
Michael Wesch is an Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University. He’s really a media ecologist, and perhaps the first cultural anthropologist to study and teach Digital Ethnography, He gave an excellent presentation to the Library of Congress last summer called “An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube”. If you haven’t seen it yet, I hope you take the time to watch it in it’s entirety. Especially if you think YouTube is only for funny animal videos and silly home movies. Trust me, it’s so much more.
I promise, after watching the video below you’ll never look at YouTube the same way again.