Stuart Hall On Youtube

Unfortunately, it's a severly abridged Stuart Hall, and one suspects that the real weight or thrust of the argument, not to mention its subtlety, is lost for brevity's sake. God knows we could have used less Spike Lee and more Hall at the beginning - and the prefatory remarks from the guy from UMass seem somewhat superfluous as well, or at least the manner in which Hall's lecture is chopped up and repackaged seems limiting. Fears of digital diploma mills and the continuing erosion of academic control over academic work notwithstanding (and maybe the way that gets phrased is often dangerously reactionary) it would be pretty great if one could watch cultural studies lectures on Youtube, even if there is a very real danger which must be first overcome in the continuing growth of a rigidly structured superstar system in the professoriate, increasing casualization of academic workers inside and outside of the classroom or digital equivalent thereof, and a dissapearance of the actual work of teaching and interacting with students or restriction of such to the very wealthy and privileged - not that this isn't already a serious problem in US higher education. (A search for Raymond Williams yields tennis clips of Serena and Venus, while "althusser" is someone who posts minimalist ukelele renditions of "There is a Light That Never Goes Out."