YouTube is a continually evolving social networking site that allows users as well as corporate giants to generate original content. As a consequence, any academic work attempting to comment on this online phenomenon is dealing with slippery subject matter. Fortunately, researchers Jean Burgess and Joshua Green have begun the process of offering an in-depth look at the website with YouTube – Online Video and Participatory Culture (Polity 2009). In this work, the authors discuss the proliferation of webcam cultures through the medium of vlogging (video blogging). Moreover, they directly address the issue of litigation in relationship to YouTube, in that corporations such as Viacom believe acts of copyright infringement are occurring with content that has been uploaded to the site (33). Later in their piece, the authors deliberate upon the negative influence of corporate sponsors upon YouTube content (105). In both situations, looming corporate monoliths are inevitably affecting a website that started out as an expression of individual creativity.
Thankfully, in contrast to these darker views, thoughts of an electronic renaissance sprouted in my mind when I read Burgess and Green’s comment, “YouTube, Inc. can be seen as the ‘patron’ of collective creativity, controlling at least some of the conditions under which creative content is produced, ordered and re-presented for the interpretation of audiences” (60). With this model of a media giant like YouTube functioning as a patron via its massive repository of user-generated videos, I celebrate the sites’ egalitarian approach to representing both talented and amateur YouTuber attempts at vlogging, making short films, and remixing existing media. Some of these people have become YouTube “stars,” and a select number of them share in the site’s revenue (98), which genuinely surprised me, as I did not consider that YouTube would actually pay any of its contributors. I was similarly intrigued by Burgess and Green’s statement that YouTube is “evolving into a massive, heterogeneous, but for the most part accidental and disordered, public archive” (88) as I agree with the idea that institutional archives will probably not be storing or presenting a vast majority of the material available on the site.
Henry Jenkins, whom I have admired as a media scholar since reading his Textual Poachers back in the 90s also contributes an essay to YouTube titled “What Happened Before YouTube.” In this piece, Jenkins reminds scholars who have proclaimed YouTube as a phenomenal meeting place of user-generated cultural production and distribution that fan cultures, particularly science fiction ones, have been in operation since the 1920s. I especially appreciate when he points out, “not every amateur media maker wants to turn pro” (119). He also discusses the emergence of Astroturf, which he defines as “fake grassroots media-content produced by commercial media companies and special interest groups but passed off as coming from individual amateurs” (122). For me, any fake individual videos posted by companies, or corporations, which the law horribly defines as a person, are nefarious productions by large businesses, whose ilk have already wrecked economic havoc upon a post-2008 United States economy. If anything, YouTube should be a bastion of honesty and sincerity, even if some of the user-generated content is dark-hearted and offensive.
The second specially commissioned essay, John Hartley’s “Uses of YouTube: Digital Literacy and the Growth of Knowledge” was more of an uneven read. The author begins his piece by pointing out the he and his fellow researchers in 2003-5 invented YouTube first in the form of a project they called the Youth Internet Radio Network, or YIRN. He adds that “just as [YIRN’s] funding ran out, YouTube was launched” (127). Perhaps I am imbuing his writing with a darker reading, but I had the feeling that a sense of bitterness and resentment accompanied Hartley pointing out this fact. After all, YouTube sold to Google for 1.65 billion dollars in November 2006, a relatively short time after it launched in June 2005 (1). In light of this fact, I ask myself if Hartley would even have composed this essay if YIRN had instead achieved YouTube’s level of financial success. He does, however, successfully argue in this chapter that schools are lax in integrating “open system labyrinths” (131) such as YouTube into their educational structures from a creative, user-generating perspective. From a creative writer’s POV, I likewise liked how he points out that media such as television and movies are represented by “mere hundreds” of writers while millions of people consume their manufactured “stories, experiences, and identities” (132). With this sobering reality in place, the need for original creative expressions on the web and fan communities is more pressing than ever.
On a closing note, I would like to mention the new working vocabulary I have acquired from reading YouTube – Online Video and Participatory Culture. This semester, when I read media theory books such as Burgess and Green’s, I compile a list of scholarly words I can apply to my future dissertation, which I would like to involve a gender studies approach toward science-fiction/fantasy/horror/comic-book cultures. Imagine my delight, then, as I add the following words to my working vocab list: DIY (do-it-yourself), DIWO (do-it-with-others) aca-fan, redaction, post-broadcast era, mediascape, participation gap, confessional culture, communicative ecology, mass-popular platform, and hybrid media space. Since I realize that all scholars in any field must, like anyone learning a new language, begin by learning basic vocabulary words, with an eye toward mastery of a particular argot, this acclimation process is both daunting and exhilarating. However, I already feel more conversant in the scholarly discussions concerning YouTube and have already begun to apply theoretical approaches to this online phenomenon to the composition classes I am currently teaching.
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