Trying the DW crossposter again. Apologies if it looks awful; I do not understand how to make the cut tag work in the rich text interface, much less the block quote, and think that Semagic may be my best option for the time being. C’lick Me: A Netporn Studies Reader (eds. Katrien Jacobs, Marije Janssen, & Matteo Pasquinelli). Freely downloadable.
As with the other entry in the series I read, quality of contributions varies widely. Perhaps of interest: PlayBlog: Pornography, Performance and Cyberspace, by Nishant Shah, analyzes “netporn” from an Indian perspective, focusing on the libidinal economy of LJ in a way that is very similar to Kristina Busse’s analysis of the erotics of fan exchanges, especially on LJ, except that Shah considers all journalling to have an orgiastic trajectory.

Ssspread.com: The Hot Bods of Queer Porn, by Barbara DeGenevieve, made me think of fandom, not directly analogous but there were certain similarities: “Queers aren’t supposed to have the same fantasies as hets and if they do, those fantasies are certainly not perceived to have the same origins. Oddly enough, on Ssspread, the closer the scene came to hetero-normative role-play, the hotter the viewers thought it was. But I suspect queer porn is assumed to be on higher moral ground by liberal segments of academia simply because it’s queer and not heterosexual.

And Julie Levin Russo, possibly a familiar name, contributed ‘The Real Thing’: Reframing Queer Pornography for Virtual Spaces. She argues that porn “is typically understood as having a privileged relationship to the real in one or more of four ways:
• it records an unsimulated, authentic sexual act (realness of production)
• its images appear real due to their character and conventions (realness of representation)
• it acts directly on the viewer to produce real effects (realness of reception)
• it is directly tied to real economic, political, and/or cultural processes (realness of social context)[.]”
But the idea of a privileged relationship to reality is inconsistent both with digital representation and with queerness, which can’t rely on the idea of “an established, static ‘real’ sexuality.” Porn, she argues, does “a certain ideological work for the Internet as a whole, importing the cinematic sense of referentiality that Williams identifies as porn’s legacy into a medium with which it is no longer commensurate.” So we should beware “of the impulse to reject the purported artificiality and objectification of pornography with calls for porn that is more real and authentic: this rhetorical move adopts the terms of anti-porn anxieties, and disavows the fact that pornography’s perceived connection to the real is often precisely what makes it seem emblematic of the evils of commodity capitalism — just as the money shot is the quintessential marker of both spontaneous and involuntary sexual confession and conventionalized, manufactured pornographic spectacle.”

Video Vortex Reader: Responses to YouTube, eds. Geert Lovink & Sabine Niederer

The Practice of Everyday (Media) Life, by Lev Manovich, analyzes anime music video through de Certeau: “during the time since the publication The Practice of Everyday Life, companies have developed new kinds of strategies. These strategies mimic people’s tactics of bricolage, re-assembly and remix. In other words: the logic of tactics has now become the logic of strategies.” Unfortunately the rest of the analysis is rather more shallow than I would have hoped.

Patricia G. Lange, (Mis)Conceptions about YouTube, has an interesting discussion of “haters” on YouTube and the ways in which anonymity may be over-blamed for bad cyberspace behavior.

Alexandra Juhasz, Why Not (to) Teach on YouTube, writes about her frustrations teaching a course on and about YouTube:

We found the site to be inexcusably poor at:
– Allowing for lengthy, linked, synchronous conversation using the written word outside the degenerated standards of on-line exchange where slurs, phrases, and inanities stand-in for dialogue.
– Creating possibilities for communal exchange and interaction (note the extremely limited functionality of YouTube’s group pages where we tried our best to organize our class work), including the ability to maintain and experience communally permanent maps of viewing experiences.
– Finding pertinent materials: the paucity of its search function, currently managed by users who create the tags used for searching, means it is difficult to find what you want in the impressive holdings of the site. For YouTube to work for academic learning, it needs some highly trained archivists and librarians to systematically sort, name, and index its materials.
– Linking video, and ideas, so that concepts, communities and conversation can grow. It is a hallmark of the academic experience to carefully study, cite, and incrementally build an argument. This is impossible on YouTube.
 Given that the site is owned by Google, a skilled and wealthy corporation, and that all these functionalities are easily accessible on other Web 2.0 applications, we were forced to ask: why do they not want us to do these things on YouTube?

 I really felt her observations about the power of hierarchy in the classroom and the classroom/“real world” divide:

it was stunning for me to see the strength of the students’ desires to re-establish the privacy of the classroom: they tried to figure all kinds of walls between the class and the greater YouTube community. This, only the first example of their profound need to bring discipline to a class (and space) where I had given much of it away, as does Web 2.0 more generally. Of course, this raises the question: in what circumstances do we find discipline pleasurable or at least necessary, and at what cost do we let it go in certain arena of social interaction? ….
Of the many surprises and challenges of this class, it was most dumbfounding for me to find how resistant my students were to the loss of discipline, authority, and structure in the classroom. They hated the amount of process this course demanded; disliked that I wouldn’t just tell them stuff; were reluctant to do course work in a new format in which they lacked training; and generally wanted me to take control so that they could attend to other things and more clearly understand what they needed to do to satisfy me. Why, we might ask, do they enjoy the aimlessness and devaluing of authority on YouTube, but still want it in their education, even as any student would say, in a heartbeat, that they wish school was less boring, more fun, more entertaining?

 Adrian Miles, Programmatic Statements For a Facetted Videography, is writing about technology that allows viewers to rearrange shots as a self-conscious aspect of the video site hosting the shots, but I thought he was also talking about vidding, because once someone knows about video editing, the possibilities he calls for are immanent in every already-edited video sequence. As with writing fanfic, once you know that video can be reedited you can experience the version presented to you as something other than final:

From the point of view of granularity the most significant feature of the shot is that it is always and already whole. You can’t have ‘half’ a shot: if the shot is twenty seconds and you then cut it in half you end up with two shots of ten seconds, each of which is still whole. This, of course, demonstrates that the ‘wholeness’ of a shot is qualitative, not quantitative, so that the integrity of the shot is not tied to scale or even duration. …[I]t is quite unusual in terms of a discursive and creative mode of practice because for so many other ways of doing to cut something in half, or other sized bits, produces quite different things. For example, you can’t just cut a sentence in half and still have a meaningful unit, or a book, or a line of a poem.
…. [A]s is well documented the most significant way in which the shot can be fundamentally altered is by the relations it is placed within – where and how it is placed within a sequence. . . . [T]he meaning or value attributed to the shot is highly contextually determined by these sequences. … [O]nce we recognise the importance of such external relations we can see that any shot must, by definition, exist in a multiple set of possible relations with other shots (this is what allows for editing in the first instance), and that the specific art of editing in traditional film and video practice is of course the determination of these relations into a fixed, canonical and singular linear form – a form that in the traditions of all good modernist and romantic aesthetics will appear to make perfect good sense in and of itself. Editing is therefore the production of relations between small wholes into larger wholes where the larger whole (the sequence, the work) appears to be self sufficiently whole.
…. [N]on–linear editing systems offer the sorts of functionality in relation to sound and image that word processing has afforded text.…. These systems, just as with word processing, offer all the advantages of the digital for the production of content, but remove them for the user at the point of publication. For example, while using a word processor it is trivial to move text, annotate it (with voice, image or other text), change fonts, resize the screen and so on. But as a word processor all of these tools are actually directed towards getting those words on paper (hence pagination, page numbering and so on). Once on paper, all of those functions just listed (and many others) are gone. It is exactly the same with video, where similarly the video work is malleable and fluid in quite extraordinary ways while being edited, but once committed to publication these features are removed – it becomes resolutely and immutably flat. …[I]t is possible to imagine a video architecture and practice that is able to retain this granularity after publication, where videos can be created that consist of shots that no longer have a canonical sequence.

So, whereas Miles suggests that word processing's output takes away the flexibilities of the input, I'd argue that the wide availability of word processing and video editing software mean that the output implicitly retains its malleability. It need not bear visible traces of editability to be recognized as editable; that's what fandom's for.