Kenneth Leung

On February 14th I got four volunteers to participate in this project. They were arbitrarily given a position to argue in the debate, so their arguements may not reflect their personal opinion. Given printed material on the Google/China issue from the internet, they were allowed 10 minutes to form their argument. After which the debate would be recorded on a DV Handy-cam. For 2 minutes each member from each side would give an opening statement presenting their main argument. Two minutes would be given to each member to give a counter-argument. Finally 2 minutes would be given to defend their argument and give a closing statement.

As it is there were four participants that provided emergent content for the piece that would result in a video essay that approached different side of the issue from four different perspectives. The setup wasn't as organized as I had planned and we were a bit rush for time, but we managed to get through the debate fine. If my goal was to spark a debate amongst classmates over the issue of Google and China, then I believe I have succeeded. However my goal goes beyond that. I wanted to see if a video like this could inspire others to post their own comments, statements, and opinions in a video format. On www.youtube.com users can upload, publish, and share their personal videos much like Flickr. The videos can be given descriptions, tagged, and commented by other users. Along with being commented by other users, other users can post related videos. I think what is great about this last feature in relation to this project is that other users can post their own video opinion on the page that host this video debate. In essence when more people start posting their own opinions on video, the page becomes an interactive video forum.

Ideally, I envision that a web 2.0 app like youtube.com or an extension of youtube.com could be created in the near future that would mediate public video debate between groups or individuals. Under such an application, people would able to post their arguments, comments, and opinions on a subject and could also vote on the validity, insightfulness, or entertainment value of the post. 

So I encourage anyone who has access to a web cam or camcorder, and is interested in this project or controversial debate to participate and post a video of your comments, opinions, or an argument in relation to this debate or to the issue of Google censoring their search results to China. The video comment should be posted to www.youtube.com and should be added to the page where this video debate is host as a related video.

I would like to give my thanks to Jesse Vigil, Mike Stein, Scott Gillies, Mike Brazil, and Peggy Weil for participating and helping me with this prototype.

Note: The video says CTIN 518 it should be CTWR 518

Here's my opinion that I posted on www.youtube.com