Speaking “Out of Place”: YouTube Documentaries and Viewers’ Comment Culture as Political Education

Abstract

This article examines the comment culture that accompanies documentary films on YouTube as a site of (geo) political education. It considers how viewers try to teach each other about the proper “place” of critique in response to the global, national, and local rhetoric featured in one environmental documentary film. YouTube viewers use comments to attempt to socialize as well as educate each other about political subjectivity in relation to the appropriateness of critiquing based on geography. Expanding on what Wendy Brown calls untimely critique, I propose the concept of unplaced critique to refer to events in which critique is labeled as inappropriate or “out of place,” and conversely as a virtuous practice of speaking questionably. The article is based on a study of viewers’ comments on YouTube in response to Oil in Eden: The Battle to Protect Canada's Pacific Coast (Pacific Wild, 2010), a short documentary film about political resistance to a pipeline proposal in Canada.

Notes

¹While it continues to be uncertain whether or not the pipeline will be built, several decisions have already been made at various levels of government. At the provincial level, the government of British Columbia rejected Enbridge's proposal to build the Northern Gateway pipeline in May of 2013. Despite this, later that year in December 2013, the Joint Review Panel, established by the Canadian National Energy Board at a federal level, recommended that Enbridge's proposed Northern Gateway pipeline be built pending 209 conditions. In response to this recommendation, in January 2014, British Columbia's indigenous communities and a coalition of environmental groups launched a court challenge to the Joint Review Panel's recommendations, of which the outcomes are still pending. Even though the court challenge was in place, the Canadian federal government accepted the Joint Review Panel's recommendations and approved the pipeline in June 2014, as long as the conditions are met. It is still unknown whether the pipeline will be built. At the time of writing, Canadian newspapers have speculated that several companies (such as Cenovus Energy Inc. and Suncor Inc. and the Chinese government-owned China National Offshore Oil Corp) have signed non-binding precedent agreements as Enbridge's potential partners or customers, although the specific corporations with which Enbridge will choose to partner remain unknown. As one of the 209 conditions, the company needs to secure clients for at least 60% of the crude oil before it is allowed to build the pipeline.

²Oil is referred to as “dirty oil” in various ways, depending on context. Oil is considered “dirty” when in comparison to cleaner forms of oil when its extraction or refining requires a large amount of oil to produce. The second popular interpretation of “dirty oil” refers to the ethics of using oil from a country that has a bad record of human rights.

³The comments have been kept mostly intact. Capitalized letters are original. Only spelling mistakes have been corrected, and excessive profanities have been removed.

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Notes on contributors

Marcelina Piotrowski

Marcelina Piotrowski is a doctoral candidate in Cross-Faculty Inquiry in Education in the Faculty of Education at the University of British Columbia. Her research focuses on adult education, critical media studies, and political education for social change, and her approach is informed by cultural studies and poststructuralist approaches.