Godzilla vs. Mothra

Message:
The video medium and the print medium inherently convey different kinds of messages. There are plenty of ideas that are broad enough or simple enough that they can be communicated through both adequately, but there are many more whose contents are affected. I won't go into what these inherent differences are, mainly because I don't know where to begin. But I might return to this.

Audience:
Another difference is in the audience that either medium is more likely to reach. This is partly a result of the kinds of messages that are usually conveyed through each--so that an "academic" is traditionally more likely to be exposed to a message published in a book or scholarly journal than one posted in a video on YouTube, because the kind of messages that many "academics" would be interested in are usually printed. Of course there are some dramatic exceptions to this (depending on the field, for instance), but in any case the converse is almost certainly true, and a message disseminated via YouTube is more likely to be viewed by a lot of non-academics than is a scholarly article.

Time:
A video is also more likely to reach more people in general, in part because of its relationship with time; videos take less time, but--unlike a book, which can be read at different speeds, and picked up or put down at any time--they also demand a fixed amount of time to watch (it's pretty uncommon, I think, for someone to watch the first 30 seconds of a YouTube video and pause to come back to it later). Hence, for the typical internet flâneur/flâneuse, they relieve him/her of the "responsibility" of surfing/wandering; they demand attention--often forcefully--and for the duration of the video, the viewer is committed to a worthy (read: focused) undertaking.

Context:
Another important and related effect is created by the context or connotations of the chosen medium. To grossly over-generalize, a printed article is typically expected to give a well-researched, sober argument, with a thorough (lengthy) discussion, and should appeal primarily to the intellect. A video, on the other hand, is often informal and entertaining, brief, and emotionally affecting. Of course it's possible (and desirable) to reverse these tendencies. For instance, if we publish our research as a video, we will still need to be just as rigorous in our research as if we had printed it (though we may also put more effort into making our video entertaining).

Goals:
I would like my group's research project to reach a large number of people, and change both they way they think about squatting in particular, and how they apply the associated values to their own lives in general. The most effective way to affect people's values is with an emotional argument; the most effective way to affect people's ideas is with a rational one. To these ends, I think a video would be the most appropriate medium, because it is most capable of a mix of these two types of appeal.

Update:
Exchange:
Before video, the screen was, along with radio, the most linear of communication media. A message that was broadcast--either to theaters via film or to homes via television--was in some sense "injected" into the veins of culture. This still occurs today of course, but, since the emergence of video, the screen has also become a medium capable of multilateral exchange. Or maybe it was just since the rise of video on the internet; it's hard to imagine a lot of people actually communicating by mailing VHS tapes back and forth (unless you've seen Videodrome enough times).
Internet videos have become, like academic publications, media of discussion.
Well, I lost my train of thought. More later...

Update 5/14:
Goals 2: I might have been too hasty in this part. If we're doing social research as it is described by C. C. Ragin, then emotional appeal is not a concern, or at least shouldn't be more than a secondary goal. He does say that social researchers "use traditional text media almost exclusively." I understand that we're not being typical social researchers, but I'm not sure to what extent (beyond medium of presentation) what we're doing differs. Are we being innovative with respect to just form, or form and content, or formal content, or contentious form?

Convoluted Living

Boredom, Eternal Return

How does one recognize boredom? There are at least two types of boredom: reflexive, and reflective. Reflexive boredom is unconscious--it is a restlessness that seeks occupation. In other words, it is a mind that seeks confinement in some external routine--an escape from itself. Reflective boredom requires an opportunity and a capacity to recognize that one is bored, to consider the reasons for this boredom. It is equivocal; in this state, one is never completely sure that one is actually bored (having nothing to do is no longer so easy: just recognizing boredom is an action that might reverse it). Through this ambiguity it severs its connections with external expectation (of an antidote), and the boredom becomes a mirror. Suddenly the environment that one inhabits stops being an other in a dialogue, and instead becomes a projection in a monologue: One turns one's house into one's own.
Squatting arises from this kind of boredom--the boredom that instigates a return to oneself, both of oneself, and of one's environment. In incorporating the environment, the squatter takes responsibility for it. And as one body, the squatter-and-his/her-environment no longer relies on a feeding tube, but generates his/her/its own food. Reflective boredom is a revolving doorway to self-reliance and self-sufficiency.

---

"The readable transforms itself into the memorable [...] the viewer reads the landscape of his childhood in the evening news [...] A different world (the reader's) slips into the author's place." De Certeau, Michel. 'The Practice of Everyday Life.' The Consumption Reader. 259-65.

"Rather than relying on use-by dates to tell them what food is edible and safe, freegans use their innate senses of touch, taste and smell. This attitude marks a conscious shift away from corporate control enabling the diver to reclaim a connection to their senses and to the natural world." Edwards, Ferne and Mercer, David (2007) 'Gleaning from Gluttony: an Australian youth subculture confronts the ethics of waste', Australian Geographer, 38:3, 279 - 96.

Squatting and dumpster diving (related through both ethics and culture) are turning inward, transitively and intransitively. In consuming non-consumable food (food that lacks a sponsor), one 'returns to one's senses.' Likewise, inhabiting an uninhabited, (conventionally) uninhabitable building is 'reinterpreting' it as habitable. All of this involves rereading an article as something more familiar (personal), more present, and more functional.