The Popular as the Political: Critical Media Pedagogy as a Condition for Grassroots Collective Action Mobilization via YouTube Videos

This dissertation examines the role of Critical Media Pedagogy as an innovative platform for grassroots political mobilization in the age of new media. New media and social networks can equip individuals with practical tools to exert active human agency as a condition for a successful political mobilization. Online videos provide people with unprecedented resources to recruit and organize others for sociopolitical matters in their everyday lives, entailing the democratization of leadership roles as a form of popular critical pedagogy on YouTube. Narrative and identity formation are also important contributions that people develop and fortify voluntary human agency while producing alternative online videos. Popular YouTube video production suggests a reconsideration of the practical importance of Bertolt Brecht's politics of aesthetics. In turn, it also provides Cultural Studies with a more practical edge to implement cultural politics of media representations. Finally, as a new approach to the media effect scholarship, Critical Media Pedagogy facilitates producing the effects of people that determine the pragmatic outcome of specific media uses rather than applying pre-determined media effects. With benefits of Critical Media Pedagogy, people actively implement a Situationist intervention into sociopolitical matters in their everyday lives via alternative YouTube videos.