The movement away from prepackaged entertainment by the established media companies has many contradictions. Is it grassroots, or top down? Is it selfie, or watching passively? Is it a fully disruptive phenomena opening the door to new players, or just another way for giant corporations to make returns?
Contradictions perhaps similar to Elvis or the Rolling Stones, who were all about non conformity and rebellion in their style and their music. Transgressive outsiders was the role, but they were introduced to mass America on the Ed Sullivan show. Both seemed to foment or at least parallel a counter culture, but both were part of huge corporate machines selling records.
Which is by way of intro to entertainment (whatever it is) streaming online to massive numbers of “users” or “the audience”. Game channels allow one to play games, but also to watch others playing games. This has become huge in terms of users. And viewers.
Or one might be a sort of MC doing/creating Vines, or YouTube videos, or Twitch…and also garner huge numbers of “subscribers”.
This is where the eyeballs and ears and who knows, maybe hearts, of the next generations are presently preoccupied. One “star” of this phenomenon is a guy who creates tons of videos, and recently had upwards of 37M subscribers…going by the nom de plume of PewDiePie.
AS eLearning creators and promulgators, we need to be aware of what captures the imagination of learners…and some of that will be from the world of “popular” culture. Maybe a DLE would prosper with someone playing the DJ or MC role, like PewDiePie does.
As noted in the article below, and as Bob Dylan sang, “something is happening here, and you don’t know what it is, do you Mr. Jones“. Just like Ed Sullivan had no clue what the appeal of Elvis was, other than blocking the lower half of his swiveling hips on TV, we may puzzle over the cultural shorthand that all the “kids” know by way of being born at the same time into the same world.
[gview file=”https://publicservicesalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/PewDiePie-on-how-he-became-King-of-YouTube.pdf”]