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- Herausgeber: transcript Verlag
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: Edition Medienwissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
YouTube features a wide array of multimodal musical figurations, including fan-made music videos, musical aestheticisations of pre-circulating content, and musical self-performances. Jonas Wolf explores open-ended forms of musical creative relay on YouTube, delving into formal, imitative, affective, and (non-)institutional aspects of networked media remix and (self-)aestheticisation. Beyond creating value for non-musical fields of discourse, this study is directed at filling a gap in a largely ocularcentric domain of study. It provides a concise theory of vernacular composition within our time's total digital archive that accounts for socio-aesthetic phenomena and their relation to systems of knowledge, control, and discourse.
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Seitenzahl: 464
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
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Jonas Wolf
Re-Composing YouTube
Vernacular Musical Aesthetics in the Digital Age
Doctoral Thesis in the Faculty of Social Sciences and Cultural Studies, Giessen
Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek
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First published in 2024 by transcript Verlag, Bielefeld
© Jonas Wolf
Cover layout: Maria Arndt, Bielefeld
Cover illustration: AI-generated (Jonas Wolf, Braunschweig using Leonardo AI)
Printed by: Majuskel Medienproduktion GmbH, Wetzlar
https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839473825
Print-ISBN: 978-3-8376-7382-1
PDF-ISBN: 978-3-8394-7382-5
EPUB-ISBN: 978-3-7328-7382-1
ISSN of series: 2569-2240
eISSN of series: 2702-8984
Contents
Acknowledgements
1Introduction
2Towards a Conceptual Framework of Vernacular Re-Composition
2.1Media Texts and Authors of Referential Re-Composition on YouTube: An Overview
2.2Distributed Control and Immaterial Labour: Reflections on the Concept of Produsage
2.3A First Approach to YouTube-Situated Vernacular Aesthetics
3.Contextualising and Categorising Media Objects of Musical Produsage
3.1Meta-Discursive Music Video
3.2Everyday (Self-)Capture and Re-Appropriation: Audiovisual Objets Trouvés
3.3Composing with Computational Surface and Interface Effects
4Circulation, Imitation, and Play Affective and Formal Dimensions of Contagious Musical Remix
4.1Conceptual Remix Beyond Notions of Mechanistic Virality
4.2“Meme Music”? Meta-Memetic Play as Epitome of Viral Spread
5Musical (Micro-)Celebrities Authorial Strategies and Vernacular Repertoires
5.1Musical Performance of the Self in Aspirational Channel Concepts
5.2Beyond Composition: Communication, Collaboration, and the Constitution of Channels
5.3“Role-Setters” and their Activated Community: Hypnotising Tendencies and Networked Relations
6Challenges and Vernacular Competencies of Selectivity and Evasion
6.1Transcending Ironic Distance in Networked (Re-)Composition
6.2How to be Differently Different – “Becoming-Imperceptible” in an Environment of Commensurability
7Conclusion
Bibliography
Secondary Sources
Primary Sources
List of Figures
Acknowledgements
This book is based on the doctoral dissertation that I completed at Justus Liebig University Giessen in October 2023. The PhD thesis was written in the field of musicology within the doctoral programme at the university’s International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC).
These last few years have been quite a journey. Besides the actual writing process, which at times felt like an emotional rollercoaster ride, the work on my dissertation project has let me stay in beautiful places, accompanied me through periods of companionship and (pandemic-related) isolation, and — most importantly — introduced me to new wonderful people, whose influence on my life during this time goes far beyond mere academic exchange. For many reasons, this endeavour would not have been possible without them.
First, I would like to express my deepest gratitude and appreciation to my supervisors Matteo Nanni and Ben Piekut. Perhaps what I admire most about Matteo, apart from his immense knowledge, is his open-mindedness and supportive spirit. It has always been a particular pleasure exchanging all kinds of thoughts with him, visiting conferences, and teaching together. Although my thesis is finished, I am sure our paths will cross again.
I will always be grateful to Ben for his willingness and sincere interest with which he agreed to supervise my project. Not only is he an incredibly kind person, but he is also a great advisor whose thorough examinations of my work in progress never ceased to leave me inspired and motivated. I feel privileged to have had the opportunity to receive his invaluable advice.
Moreover, I would like to acknowledge the generous PhD stipend by the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture in Giessen that allowed me to begin this new academic chapter in the first place. I will never forget the supportive and stimulating atmosphere at the GCSC — and, of course, my friends and colleagues in and around the centre with whom I shared many academic and non-academic experiences: Gerlov van Engelenhoven, Genia van Engelenhoven, Riley Linebaugh, Stefan Trajković-Filipović, Marie-Christine Boucher, Aleksander Talović, Alexander Flaß, Zerina Catović, Marija Spirkovska, Ruben Pfizenmeier, Johanna Munzel, Sahra Rausch, Eva Zimmermann, Fatma Kargin, Theresa Krampe, Zoran Vučkovac, Silvia Boide, thank you for being great doctoral companions.
As my musical projects during my time in Giessen probably helped me keep myself relatively sane, they deserve a special mention. I would like to thank the entire symphony orchestra of Justus Liebig University (you know who you are, the list of names is simply too long), Jana, Leonie, and Sebastian from the legendary Kheo Quartet, and, last but not least, my rodent friends Gerlov and Jonas with whom I had the pleasure of sharing the rehearsal room and a couple of stages (hoping to jam with you again soon).
Moving to a different place for the last year of my writing phase was definitely a challenge. I am happy to say that, in Rheinsberg, I did not only find a new job but new friends. This paragraph is reserved for one person in particular: Thank you, Friederike, for your patience, your support, for being a great thinking partner and a critical proofreader — and simply for being there. I could not be happier to have met you and have you in my life.
Finally, I want to thank my family for being optimistic and patient throughout my academic journey and during the last steps of this dissertation. I know that I always have their support and can rely on them. This might be the main reason why I could successfully complete this project.
1Introduction
Whenever one delves into the world of user-generated content on YouTube, one is surrounded by a multitude of performative expressions of authenticity, proximity, self-irony, banality, profanity, and vulgarity. From the platform’s very early days of “broadcasting yourself” to its current oversaturated and commercially territorialised condition, they have shaped the audiovisual and communicative repertoires of vernacular content creation, which continually develop throughout processes of widespread imitation and remix. In the context of networked musicking, mutual remediations between pre-existing musical forms and conventions, on the one hand, and networked cultural practices of self-expression and communal self-affirmation, on the other, let emerge a wide array of multimodal musical figurations, including fan-made music videos, musical aestheticisations of pre-circulating content, and musical self-performances. Similar to other areas of vernacular content, musical practices of user-led, participatory, and combinatorial play with found, remixed, and manipulated media objects bear witness to an overall tendency towards a particularly high-volume circulation of lo-fi aesthetics, re-appropriations of cultural detritus, and bizarre juxtapositions. I have always been fascinated by these accelerated and open-ended forms of creative relay on YouTube, which at times can unfold a strange hypnotic potential, letting you chime in with the algorithmically curated stream of interconnected videos, until you snap back to reality in the middle of a rubber chicken rendition of Toto’s Africa, wondering how you got there and why you are watching it at 3 a.m. My initial, probably very common, amazement finally inspired a more substantial inquiry, which over time formed into this book. Naturally, over the course of my research, several questions emerged: (How) does the very logic of ongoing imitative and referential composition and mashup afford the necessary re-domesticating effect in a networked environment where traditional localisms, due to non-binding and fragmented social arrangements, provide less connectability? Does the prevalent strangeness of low-threshold musicking represent “YouTubiness” itself, as a symptom for the unhinged and often enigmatic symbolic play and expansion the platform affords? Proceeding from an idea of vernacular re-composition as a musical practice of commonality which necessarily, at least implicitly, refers to the status of “being online,” my research project faces certain challenges regarding the conceptualisation of “home-grown” musical aesthetics on the platform: For one, many aesthetic patterns and communicative modes of performing everydayness and commonality – e.g., through self-vulgarisation and tactical dilettantism – have become an established part of repertoires of self-branding and self-celebrification. What to do with pre-existing conceptual divides between amateurs and professionals – or cultural production and (fannish) reception – in the face of the entangled practices of bottom-up cultural making, which are fuelled and shaped by countless anonymous as well as self-entrepreneurial individuals through multidirectional and simultaneous imitative encounters? How do incentives of individual prestige and claims to authorship transpire in co-creative practices that are based on a communally shared skepticism towards conventional notions of originality, virtuosity, and professionalism? How to approach the referentiality of these practices, which often seem to be ironic and affirmative at the same time?
In its multifunctionality as a video archive, a communicative environment, and a stage for aspirational self-representation, YouTube provides a rich and multifaceted environment for examining the aesthetic qualities of Internet-mediated and media-reflective vernacular re-composition beyond established binary oppositions pertaining to cultural production and reception. Since its registration as a website in 2005 and its purchase by Google in 2006, the platform has quickly risen to the status of a “total” digital archive. Despite the continual introduction and optimisation of functionalities that, for instance, categorise content on the main page or interlink videos via algorithmic recommendations, its curation of display is not centralised. As early as in 2009, Robert Gehl argued that YouTube requires agents “to gather and classify objects, and […] to reassemble them ‘into facts about the world.’”1 In networked content creation, the taxonomical organisation and classification of media objects – via titles, descriptions, tags, and comments – as well as their meaningful re-appropriation go hand in hand, curating display on the platform and fuelling the co-development of media texts and communal narratives via uploads, sharing, paratextual significations, tagging, and referential contributions such as media mashups, parodies, and communicative formats engaged with vernacular practices of meaning-making.2 Traditional binaries between “everyday users” and “professional media creators,” with concise role distributions regarding their “curatorial work” on the platform, do not account for YouTube’s participatory culture. Rather, social networks have opened up a field of cultural collaboration and co-/re-production – ranging from free, gift-oriented labour to aspirational formats and channel concepts aimed at self-celebrification – which is shaped by the ongoing (re)classification and re-assembly of cultural content by diverse agents. In this context, Jean Burgess, aptly argues that the logics of cultural production have become integrated into the logics of everyday life, as she illustrates with examples of Internet-mediated practices, ranging from digital storytelling to photo sharing via Flickr.3 This study sets a focus on vernacular musical re-composition, the aesthetic paradigms of which shall be examined in awareness of our networked condition with its entangled and hybridised processes of subjectivation and entrepreneurial activity as well as consumption and production. Like any form of collaboratively developed content in social media, community-oriented musical contributions – and their user-led classifications – are situated within a field of “produsage.” This portmanteau by Axel Bruns, composed of the words “production” and “usage,” accounts for the hybrid user/producer roles and the fundamentally incomplete and relayed cultural production in networked spaces of distributed creativity and knowledge.4 Against this conceptual backdrop, I aim at examining the musical and multimodal composition – and compositing – of audiovisual media objects on YouTube and the practices of classification, re-signification, self-display, communication, and collaboration that inform the emergence and development of platform-specific musical, screenic, and performative repertoires.
In her enlightening doctoral thesis, Paula Harper examines the trajectories of stabilisation regarding conventions of viral musicking in social media, charting “a cartography of chaos to control, a heterogeneous digital landscape funneled into predictable channels and pathways etched ever more firmly and deeply across the 2010s.”5 Similar to Harper’s reflections, temporalities of cumulative imitative encounters, curatorial developments, algorithmic diffusion, and speculative behaviour are of high importance for my study; my main interest, however, are not historical trajectories of viral participation, which Harper regards as an extension of musical behaviour. Rather, my analyses are informed by their focus on musical content as a form of – and a remediating agent for – vernacular enunciation. I am starting from the hypothesis that practices of musical re-composition realise symbolic functions that enable temporary social arrangements in networked environments beyond traditional localisms. The hereby conveyed and continually developing commonplace competencies that afford further musical produsage result from the mutual remediation of musical concepts and patterns of non-musical vernacular discourse. Vernacular re-composition can thus be grasped as a system of dispersion, constituted by the totality of circulating and materially repeatable or ideationally iterable themes, aesthetic objects, figurations, and concepts of YouTube-situated musical produsage. Against the backdrop of the contemporary ecosystem constituted by YouTube and other social media platforms, I want to examine how communal niche-mediations, which inform musical conventions and “issue vernaculars,” relate to an overall “platform vernacular” that provides the communally and technologically mediated communicative tools and genres produsers rely on.
With regard to the co-development of repertoires of musical re-composition and self-display, I want to oppose oversimplified notions of mechanistic virality. It is my aim to apply concepts of contagion beyond naturalising depictions of “passive” users as hosts for “active” media viruses. To the contrary, my examination of processes of iterative, referential, and playful re-composition shall account for human agencies. At the same time, a thorough and comparative look at existing conceptualisations of virality and contagion – not only those exclusively pertaining to digital culture – helps avoid the “affirmative trap” of celebrating online participation as a democratic act tout court that is entirely based on the active engagement of autonomous individuals. Leaning on Gabriel Tarde’s micro-sociology, I want to map networked sociality as a relational field of multidirectional and simultaneous imitative encounters which are triggered by affective stimuli. In this context, I proceed from a notion of “hypnotic” social power which neither results from nor entails the total domination of a mindless crowd by other human agents. Rather, processes of re-composition and musical interaction are understood as ramifications of the passing on of uncontainable affective surplus effects that catalyse imitative behaviour. Utopian postulates of liberatory potentials regarding creative exchange and produsage in social networks shall furthermore be contrasted by aspects of algorithmic agency: Feedback loops between human-led and algorithmic content curation – and human anticipations of the latter – let emerge dynamic systems of representation and commensurability that inform processes of signalisation (via tags, titles, thumbnails, video descriptions, etc.). Aesthetic differences of single contributions are necessarily preceded by these processes, as they enable widespread connectability and visibility. Thus, I want to conduct my analyses of musical contributions in awareness of these symbolic self-positionings by produsers, which entail fields of tension between individuation and de-individuation, difference and indifference, invention and stasis, aesthetic singularity and hive mind creativity.
Both aspects of contagious imitative encounters and algorithmic agency are linked to the circulation of content – after all, in order to become inscribed into a generalisable repertoire that spreads via algorithmic diffusion as well as repetitive imitative and referential activity, compositional forms, formats, and concepts need to circulate in sufficient volume. In order to attain visibility, contributors – particularly those with a certain upload frequency – rely on media of rationalisation and direct feedback mechanisms which inform content creation and reception on the platform. In this context, the doubly constituted interpellation of produsers as both subjected as well as free and responsible subjects shall be sketched. Particularly aspirational forms of re-composition and self-display on the platform are in need of thorough examination in this regard, as they are necessarily accompanied by algorithmic anticipation and strategies of self-optimisation. Since my analysis is centred on aesthetic phenomena, my investigation of the platform’s socio-technical infrastructure – which comprises intertwined algorithmic and human agencies – remains limited to the extent that it helps illuminate the different ways in which circulating forms and formats of musical composition and communication are anticipated, adapted, re-appropriated, referenced, and shared by human actors.6 In this context, I want to draw on notions of immaterial and affective labour, as developed by post-workerist theorists in view of the extensive transformation of social relations and activities into sources for capitalist valorisation since the 1960s.7 Particularly in view of self-entrepreneurial activity on YouTube, I aim to illuminate strategies of self-optimisation and self-representation by aspirational subjects in regard to their musicaland communicative performance as composers and entertainers. Hereby, my main focus will be on the effects of affective labour on the emergence and development of concrete musical forms and formats of vernacular re-composition and, more generally, on the very environment of social communication and creative collaboration in which vernacular re-composition is taking place. Of course, affective labour, aimed at the generation of proximity, authenticity, and a sense of belonging, is a constitutive feature of networked vernacular (self)expression in general – according to Michael Hardt, it “is itself and directly the constitution of communities and collective subjectivities.”8 Thus, vernacular musical activity, which by definition is community-oriented, is situated within a sphere of affective labour which ranges from free to economically aspirational forms of musicking and music-related communication. Both of these forms constitute the affective cultural production the platform serves back to its users as content. While free labour remains unwaged and can be driven by a community-oriented “gift logic,” aspirational labour is carried out in pursuit of a financial compensation, for example through YouTube’s monetisation program. However, Tiziana Terranova notes that both forms of labour constitute important forces “within the reproduction of the labor force in late capitalism as a whole” – a thought I am going to expand on.9
By way of example, “Re-Composing YouTube” is going to outline the aesthetic patterns and signalisations of commonality and authenticity – linked to low-budget production, transparency, self-vulgarisation, profanity, or tactical dilettantism – that have turned vernacular enunciation into an integral part of music-related channel concepts and self-performances that aspire for economic success and individual prestige. In this context, theorists like Graeme Turner note a surge in modes of self-celebrification in the 21st century. What differentiates “DIY celebrities” in social media from traditional forms and discourses of celebrity is the affirmation and celebration of their “ordinariness” with regard to their self-representation and their general ethos of content creation.10 What is more, different from conventional forms of celebrity, these practices of self-celebrification are based on the fostering of intimate and interactive relationships with their audience. According to Theresa Senft, these practices destabilise “ideologies of publicity by emphasizing responsiveness to, rather than distancing from, one’s community.”11 Indeed, in contrast to a conventional status of mainstream celebrity that is based on spatial distance to the audience, temporal scarcity of appearances, and extraordinary performances, aspirational social media users turn themselves into objects of consumption-oriented demands by generating and capitalising on authenticating sensual stimuli, for instance by way of exposing and thematising themselves and their everyday life in confessional vlogging formats, live streams, or Q&A videos. This phenomenon, which Senft calls “micro-celebrity,”12 can be explained with the affordances of networked co-creation: due to institutional presence in the world wide web, users were granted access to a sphere of quantitatively unlimited participation, in which they could engage in user-led content creation – suddenly, one’s own visibility could be increased considerably without traditional media gatekeepers. It is important to note in this context, however, that not only aspirational content creation but any form of community-oriented produsage only exists in subordination to institutional network locations such as YouTube, which afford user-led creation and, consequentially, the emergence of a wide array of Internet-mediated vernacular competencies in the first place. According to Robert Glenn Howard, “web vernaculars” could only emerge within the “Web 2.0,” which fostered the emerging field of produsage and conditioned the meaningfulness of a vernacular ethos which, only now, could emerge as a distinctive formation in dialectical relation to the institutionalised Internet.13 Against the backdrop of this conceptualisation of a “dialectical vernacular,” all forms of musical re-composition that are characterised by an “ordinariness” built on competencies and conventions acquired through everyday online experience, need to be understood as discursive musical performances of platform-mediated vernaculars. Different from locally situated forms of vernacular creativity, attributions of “ordinariness” and non-institutionality on YouTube are not invoked through “unmappable” practices of the everyday but rather in awareness of the commensurability of circulating forms of re-composition and self-expression. This does not only pertain to strategic forms of self-celebrification; rather, produsage as such is situated in a sphere of generality and representation fuelled by the interplay of algorithmic procedures with anticipatory and speculative musical contributions by produsers.
In a first step of my analysis, I want to approach community-oriented compositional practices on YouTube in relation to their aesthetic objects of fascination. By placing foci on computational objects, found audiovisual media, and music video-like figurations, my analysis in chapter 3 aims at adumbrating the different types of audiologovisual remediation on the platform by identifying and defining compositional trajectories of vernacular musical engagement with the cultural, historical, and medial layers of said aesthetic objects.14
Proceeding from my findings in this chapter, my further analysis in chapter 4 focusses on processes of circulation and imitation and the vernacular forms of re-composition they render visible and recognisable. In awareness of pre-existing theories of contagion and virality, this chapter inquires how multimodal forms of vernacular re-composition afford the affective stimuli and imitation-suggestibility that result in contagious overspills across the whole platform and beyond. In this context, by introducing my own conceptualisations of remixable concepts and “meme music,” I aim to shed light on the relations between platform-specific compositional forms and ongoing imitative encounters on the platform. Furthermore, my illumination of the playful and combinatorial ways in which conceptual and (im)material dimensions of aesthetic media objects are navigated and traversed seeks to account for the entanglements and ongoing branchings of compositional phenomena that are afforded by the fundamental digital principles of modularity and variability.
Chapter 5 deals with the sphere of self-entrepreneurial re-composition and its various effects on the repertoires of vernacular re-composition and processes of communal engagement and interaction. Here, musical performances of the self are examinated with regard to their situatedness within the overall field of musical produsage, particularly with regard to their influence on musical musical, screenic, and discursive patterns of convention, their aim at generating or reinforcing a sense of transparency and communal belonging, and their function as a point of reference and communal orientation. I further argue that not only singular musical performances but the overall conception and constitution of music-related channels, which includes strategies of self-representation, collaboration, evaluation, and content curation, represents an integral part of the overall affective labour of aspirational content creators. This discussion introduces an expanded notion of composition which, against the backdrop of material and social modularities, encompasses the compositing of entire YouTube channels, thereby shedding light on the interrelations between communicative strategies of self-celebrification, concise channel concepts, and musical ways of re-signifying and personifying pre-existing vernacular forms. The third sub-chapter thematises the dynamics between online communities and musical micro-celebrities fostered through communal exchange and participatory formats of vernacular musicking. Hereby, I want to avoid oversimplified notions of one-directional magnetisations from “influencers” to their (fannish) “audiences” in order to highlight the multidirectional and multisocial contagions that constitute and shape the field of networked sociality and co-creativity. At the same time, notions of interactivity shall be problematised by outlining the relations between “role-setting” and “role-following” subjects, on the one hand, and focussing on the hypnotic potentials embedded in the network relation itself.
The analysis chapters in this book build on and enrich each other in a cumulative manner: Chapter 3 provides an overview of – and detailed insights into – different types of YouTube-situated musical produsage, which my extensive discussion of imitative and iterative processes in chapter 4 relies on. Likewise, the following examination of aspirational and speculative practices of self-performance and communicative labour – and their influence on communal interaction and creative relay – is informed by my findings from chapters 3 and 4. In a final step, chapter 6 aims at an overall problematisation of issues of aesthetic and discursive difference and selectivity, which arise in the networked condition and pertain to all the aforementioned categories and phenomena of vernacular re-composition. Here, in view of the oversaturated and ever-expanding web of references on YouTube and beyond, I want to reflect on the phenomenon of post-irony, which I conceive of as a vernacular competence of situational conduct and self-expression in the face of blurred referential codes. Furthermore, in awareness of YouTube’s specific regimes of visibility and attention, I aim to delineate potentials of temporary aesthetic evasion and subversion regarding ubiquitous effects and practices of objectified co-creation and consumption.
My overall argument proceeds in awareness of the multiple fields of tension characteristic for vernacular cultural production in the YouTube era. By placing the analysed objects of vernacular musical enunciation in relation to the systems of knowledge and discourse that produce them, I aim to make these tensions describable beyond binary oppositions between amateurs and professionals, “ordinary users” and media celebrities, “influencers” and audiences, creation and consumption, affirmation and negation, and individuation and de-individuation. Hereby, the close examination of my objects of analysis, which I read as off-centred and multimodal texts of creative relay, is informed by a wide array of disciplines and schools of study such as semiotics, deconstruction, post-structuralism, critical theory, literary theory, and media studies. The sound-focussed approach of my project is afforded through musicological methods, including analyses of style, genre, reception aesthetics, and music-related discourse within contemporary digital environments of social media, technical devices, and co-creative behaviour. Against the backdrop of the networked condition and the iterative, speculative, and communicative practices it affords and suggests, my analyses and reflections are thereby guided by the following questions: 1) How can networked vernacular musical aesthetics be defined? 2) What are common compositional, performative, and discursive means of evoking a vernacular aesthetic? 3) How is vernacular musical creativity (re)mediated within YouTube’s socio-technical infrastructure and what are relevant discursive formations, communicative conventions, and forms of self-governance in this context?
I am aware that specific demographic populations might articulate vernacular re-composition differently depending on their imagined communities and distinct positions in the social field. As vernacular musical contributions in the networked sphere are based on remediations of historically grown and socially situated cultural products and practices, they attract online audiences from different socio-economic, ethnic, and gender groups. Thus, it is my hypothesis that, for instance, audiences from non-Anglo and non-European cultural matrices are differently attuned to certain musical and communicative conventions, which results in different affective pulls and media texts with their own processes of encoding and decoding. In awareness of these complex entanglements of online and offline culture, I acknowledge that the analysed vernacular musical practices do not represent a universal dataset for theorising practices of YouTube-situated vernacular re-composition tout court.
However, my study is focussed on the notion of produsage that is inextricably linked to today’s digital economy, which emerged and develops in dependency of the ubiquitous economic informatisation in overdeveloped countries.15 In her elaborations on free and aspirational labour in digital networks, Tiziana Terranova diagnoses an internal “capture” of social and cultural knowledge through the repeated address of users as active consumers and producers of meaningful commodities and social connections. Arguably, everyday online creativity develops faster and in higher volume wherever there are cultural industries that encourage and reward processes of experimenting with free affective labour. However, Terranova argues that capital does not incorporate the free labour of produsers “from the outside,” but rather describes incorporation as “a more immanent process of channeling collective labor (even as cultural labor) into monetary flows.”16 Particularly the promise of a deferred compensation – through the generation of ad revenue, affiliate marketing, or even sponsorship deals – turns free gift-oriented labour into aspirational, yet-to-be-waged labour. It is this entwinement of everyday creativity and commercialised cultural production that fosters high-volume produsage on YouTube, rendering participatory trends visible and, at the same time, increasing the need to articulate a vernacular in dialectical relation to institutionalised network locations and commodified cultural practices.
Depending on cultural and local factors, the digital realm I am researching is still gatekept in terms of access to certain hardware and software, as well as to established networks like those found in media entertainment or journalism. Unsurprisingly, as statistics suggest, the seemingly contradictory foldings of community-oriented musicking and individualistic visibility labour, which I aim to foreground, are most developed in the United States. While, for instance, India is the country with the largest YouTube audience by far, followed by the US, Indonesia, and Brazil,17 the divide between cultural producers and audiences seems to be more pronounced here: of the 50 most-subscribed channels on YouTube, 17 channels are located in India – however, all of these channels belong to big entertainment companies and music labels.18 Overall, with the exception of a few self-entrepreneurial YouTubers from South and Central America, the most-subscribed non-brand channels are predominantly located in the US.19 The total view and subscription count per country leaves a similar impression, as channels from the United States have garnered roughly twice as many views and subscriptions as Indian channels, who rank second in this statistic.20 There is reason to suspect that, on a global scale, produsage on the platform – and beyond – is heavily impacted or even catalysed by the affective labour of popular US-based and anglophone DIY celebrities. Moreover, as these channels are watched in many parts of the world, certain taste niches and literacies of reading and iterating Internet-reflexive signalisations of commonality, proximity, and authenticity develop transnationally to a certain degree. In this context, my study reflects on the fact that massively spreading phenomena of musical produsage often represent a certain normative whiteness, which can result in co-creative practices relying on appropriations of cultural practices or self-representations by marginalised groups. As Paula Harper points out, these appropriations may be “deployed to (profitable) celebration as novel by privileged mainstream practitioners” or “draw their affective power and meaning-making potential from histories of oppression and racist, sexist violence.”21 Thus, I aim to conduct my analyses of highly visible – and thus “canonic” – vernacular practices of re-composition in awareness of the aforesketched restrictions and algorithmically perpetuated biases, which tend to benefit certain privileged groups based on factors such as social class, race, and gender.
In comparison to more rigid and streamlined curations of vernacular musical creativity on other platforms, YouTube’s functionality as a video archive and a stage for self-display and communal exchange affords the emergence of a wide array of communally oriented musical forms and formats, ranging from five-second clips to 30-minute videos and including disembodied media remixes as well as dance performances and video essays. Compared to primarily mobile-based social media platforms like TikTok or Instagram, YouTube does not target one specific technology or type of media user. Moreover, in contrast to “shop window curation” that catalyses never-ending streams of interconnected videos due to its higher promise of personal visibility and prestige, the platform is more reliant on the active use of the search function – and on pre-existing offline communities that selectively pass on niche-mediated contributions. However, at the same time, mechanisms of networked aesthetic individualism – and self-commodification – are perpetuated through generalisable repertoires and strategies of self-representation and self-optimisation. Due to its less rigid pre-formatting and curational impact, YouTube downright invites a differentiated examination of a wide array of figurations and aesthetic qualities characteristic of Internet-mediated creative relay. In this context, with a particular focus on human agency, my research offers a critical examination of the symbolic self-positionings and formations of subjectivation that occur on YouTube in relation to its socio-technical infrastructure. Thereby, it gainfully adds to discourse on networked creativity in the fields of media and cultural studies, particularly with regard to conceptualisations of vernacularity, authenticity, amateurishness, and professionalism – and their relations and contradictions – in the face of entangled cultural practices between bottom-up cultural making and affective labour. Hereby, I want to take my own notion of produsage-as-labour as a vantage point in order to account for processes of free gift-oriented labour and aspirational self-optimisation that emerge in a sphere of networked control and commensurability. Primarily, however, beyond creating value for these non-musical fields of discourse, my conceptual framework is directed at filling a gap in a largely ocularcentric domain of study by providing a deeper understanding of musical processes of communal re-composition within dynamic networks of affect and (meta-)reference, produced by multidirectional co-creation, communication, and re-contextualisation via musical means. My analyses are focussed on aesthetic operations and their aspects of interplay between compositional techniques, musical references, sonic modifications, bodily performances, and the use of language. In awareness of the networked condition and its ramifications for co-creative processes of affiliation and belonging, my methodological and analytical approach is aimed at mapping out the formal, imitative, affective, functional, and (non-)institutional qualities of vernacular re-composition. It is my hope that, against the backdrop of my aforesketched critical framework, “Re-Composing YouTube” avoids the all-too-familiar trap of descriptive and affirmative approaches and, instead, provides a concise theory that accounts for musical phenomena and their relation to systems of knowledge and discourse within our time’s total digital archive: a theory of vernacular composition for and with YouTube.
1 Robert Gehl, “YouTube as Archive: Who Will Curate this Digital Wunderkammer?,” International Journal of Cultural Studies12, no. 1 (January 2009): 46, https://doi.org/10.1177/1367877908098854. In other words, processes of reassembly create narratives “post hoc from ordered, taxonomically organized objects,” which, in the case of YouTube, “are often separated from their original uses.” See ibid.
2 Contrary to this assessment, Gehl improperly describes the curatorial agency of ordinary users as limited to uploads and classifications of cultural content. In doing so, he aims to accentuate the influence of media entrepreneurs and large companies regarding the reassembly and organised exhibition of media objects on the platform. Thereby, he overlooks the vast field of vernacular creativity on the platform, which has taken shape since YouTube’s early days and, from today’s perspective, often informs the corporate harvesting of popular media objects and video formats in the first place.
3 See Jean Burgess, “Hearing Ordinary Voices: Cultural Studies, Vernacular Creativity and Digital Storytelling,” Continuum 20, no. 2 (June 2006): 201–214, https://doi.org/10.1080/10304310600641737.
4 See Axel Bruns, Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life and Beyond: From Production to Produsage (New York: Peter Lang, 2008).
5 Paula Harper, “Unmute This: Circulation, Sociality, and Sound in Viral Media” (PhD thesis, Columbia University, 2019), 2–3, https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-6rte-j311.
6 Although it falls outside the scope of my study, I consider the following research into the algorithmic mediation of cultural practices within the field of critical algorithm studies a gainful addition to my analyses: See Ned Rossiter and Soenke Zehle, “The Aesthetics of Algorithmic Experience,” in The Routledge Companion to Art and Politics, ed. Randy Martin (New York: Routledge, 2015), 214–221; Robert Seyfert and Jonathan Roberge, eds., Algorithmic Cultures: Essays on Meaning, Performance and New Technologies (London: Routledge: 2016); Michele Willson, “Algorithms (and the) Everyday,” Information, Communication & Society20, no. 1 (2017): 137–150, https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2016.1200645.
7 Post-workerist theory is deeply influenced by the intellectual heritage of Italian operaismo of the 1960s and 1970s, as the uptake of Mario Tronti’s notions of the “social factory” shows. As Tronti states in his 1962 article “La fabbrica e la società,” in high-developed capitalism, “the social relation becomes a moment of the relation of production,” while “the whole of society becomes an articulation of production” (page 26). In other words, everyday creativity and communication, as productive activities, are always subject to commodification and capital accumulation and reproduce the relations of production. Of course, Marx already conceptualised the gradual transformation of social relations and activities into sources for capitalist valorisation by introducing the notion of “real subsumption” of labour. However, Tronti reflects specifically on the post-Fordist expansion of capitalist social relations beyond the industrial sphere of manual labour, thereby anticipating the paradigm shift that would occur in the following decades with the ever-increasing flows of information introduced by new ICT. See Mario Tronti, Workers and Capital, trans. David Broder (London and New York: Verso, 2019). With regard to the post-workerist framework of immaterial labour, see Maurizio Lazzarato, “Immaterial Labor,” in Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, eds. Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt, trans. Paul Colilli and Ed Emery (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).
8 Michael Hardt, “Affective Labour,” boundary 2 26, no. 2 (Summer 1999): 89–100.
9 See Tiziana Terranova, “Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy,” Social Text 18, no. 2 (Summer 2000): 36 https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-18-2_63-33.
10 Turner thus postulates a “demotic turn” in today’s media landscape, particularly in television and the Internet. See Graeme Turner, Ordinary People and the Media: The Demotic Turn (New York: SAGE Publishing, 2009).
11 Theresa M. Senft, Camgirls: Celebrity and Community in the Age of Social Networks (New York: Peter Lang, 2008), 116.
12 See ibid. See also Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity, and Branding in the Social Media Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013).
13 See, for example, Robert Glenn Howard, “Toward a Theory of the World Wide Web Vernacular: The Case for Pet Cloning,” Journal for Folklore Research 42, no. 3 (September 2005): 323–360, https://doi.org/10.1353/jfr.2005.0028.
14 The term “audiologovisual” was proposed by Michel Chion in order to highlight the centrality of speech and written text in film, television, and music videos. I use the term in its broadest definition, namely in the context of multimodal figurations where “the word […] acquires an original form of existence that is not solely limited to the sound or to the image.” See Michel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, ed. and trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 167.
15 In Empire, Hardt and Negri describe the “succession of economic paradigms since the Middle Ages in three distinct moments, each defined by the dominant sector of the economy: a first paradigm in which agriculture and the extraction of raw materials dominated the economy, a second in which industry and the manufacture of durable goods occupied the privileged position, and a third and current paradigm in which providing services and manipulating information are at the heart of economic production. […] Economic modernization involves the passage from the first paradigm to the second, from the dominance of agriculture to that of industry. Modernization means industrialization. We might call the passage from the second paradigm to the third, from the domination of industry to that of services and information, a process of economic postmodernization, or better, informatization.” See Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 280.
16 Terranova, “Free Labor,” 38–39.
17 See Laura Ceci, “Leading countries based on YouTube audience size as of January 2023,” Statista, February 6, 2023, https://www.statista.com/statistics/280685/number-of-monthly-unique-youtube-users.
18 See “Top 50 Subscribed YouTube Channels (Sorted by Subscriber Count),” Social Blade, accessed March 30, 2023, https://socialblade.com/youtube/top/50/mostsubscribed.
19 See Shelly Walsh, “The 30 Most-Subscribed YouTube Individuals,” Search Engine Journal, January 2, 2023, https://www.searchenginejournal.com/social-media/who-has-the-most-subscribers-on-youtube/#close.
20 See Murphy Temple, “YouTube’s Top 25 Countries Ranked by Total Viewership & Subscribers,” ChannelMeter, March 1, 2019, https://channelmeter.wordpress.com/2019/03/01/youtubes-top-countries/.
21 Harper, “Unmute This,” 30–31.
2Towards a Conceptual Framework ofVernacularRe-Composition
The following literature review aims to establish a conceptual framework through the introduction of already-available relevant research and the identification of gaps that need to be filled by way of analysis and further discussion. In a first overview, collaborative media re-composition shall be examined against the backdrop of theorisations of the cultural practice of remix and textual co-production in general, thereby providing a deeper understanding of the open-endedness and the different positions and modes of authorship arising from networked and referential co-creativity. Secondly, concepts of networked individualism and produsage are set in relation to critical notions of immaterial labour and distributed control in digital networks in order to foreground potential alienating and de-individuating effects of online participation and co-creativity. Finally, informed by the claims, evidences, and discussions from the first two sub-chapters, notions of vernacular culture and creativity from both pre-digital and digital contexts guide a first approach to conceptualising YouTube-mediated vernacular aesthetics. Hereby, aspects of materiality, meta-referentiality, and performativity shall be introduced and discussed in relation to the sociality and textuality of platform-situated practices of re-composition and the technical infrastructure they are embedded in.
2.1Media Texts and Authors of Referential Re-Composition onYouTube: An Overview
Not only since “Web 2.0” became a term of everyday parlance, academic research concerned with the cultural phenomenon of user-generated co-creation of audiovisual media is continually adding to the wide array of conceptualisations regarding aspects of digitised and networked production, distribution, and reception of cultural artefacts. In terms of the resulting terminology, most striking are the seemingly related and overlapping postulations of a “Sampling Culture,” “Read/Write Culture,” “Remix Culture,” or “Bastard Culture,” to name just a few.1 These conceptualisations share an emphasis on practices of remix, bricolage, montage, or mashup, which the authors identify as principal methods of Internet-specific vernacular (co)creativity. Building on notions of remix and mashup and applying them to the media environment provided and curated by YouTube, this chapter serves as an introduction into the concepts and the terminology that will be central to the examination of vernacular musical co-creation, thereby sketching the ways in which they are related to other concepts of referentiality and providing the theoretical underpinning with regard to issues of participation and authorship that arise in this context.
In his theses on remix culture, Felix Stalder outlines the preconditions for the wide spread of referential practices, arguing that an everyday culture of remix – a cultural technique he perceives as a continuation of modern montage – can only emerge in a networked society that is saturated with media objects to the point of rendering them accessible to a broad public.2 More concretely, according to Stalder,
[m]ontage and referential processes can only become widespread methods if, in a given society, cultural objects become available in three different respects. The first is economic and organizational: they must be affordable and easily accessible. […] The second is cultural: working with cultural objects – which always create deviations from the source in unpredictable ways – must not be treated as taboo or illegal, but rather as an everyday activity without any special preconditions. […] The third is material: it must be possible to use the material and to change it.3
The pre-digital possibilities of recording and mechanically reproducing audiovisual media objects – and their spread in analogue mass media – made them accessible, yet their materiality limited the means as well as the spread of remixing. From dada montage and musique concrète over pop art and situationist interventions to early dub music and disco remixes, historical practices of re-arranging and altering “found media objects” were mainly exclusively situated in the specialised domains of (avantgarde) art and the cultural industries – save for a few exceptions. For instance, in a practice known as “vidding,” fans have engaged for decades with the combination of video footage and music from mass media sources – usually television broadcasts or film productions – in order to playfully re-create and alter the narrative dimensions of the source texts. Early vidders in the 1970s created montages by recording, selecting, cutting, and recombining televised material using VHS machines. Vidding is a prime example for community-oriented fan practices based on textual productivity – a factor which has been highlighted as a distinguishing mark of media fandom by the likes of John Fiske and Henry Jenkins.4 However, against the background of today’s digital condition, co-creative and collaborative media remixes are not an exceptional activity of tight-knit fan communities anymore, but rather a ubiquitous practice encouraged by the expansion and (supposed) equality of communicative sites and actions, turning any media consumer into a potential producer. Due to the lowered technological threshold in terms of new digitised ways of recording, storing, processing, and reproducing audiovisual media since the 1980s, the accessibilities and possibilities of transforming media objects shifted dramatically. Simultaneously, the popularisation of the Internet offered the basic socio-technical infrastructure needed for wide-spread global participation and co-creation. However, in the early days following the evolution of the world wide web into a widely recognised and used public network – or, rather, a “network of networks,” the upload, sharing, and co-creation of digital files was still taking place in a largely non-territorialised sphere that was difficult to navigate without previous knowledge. Hence, it was the curating impact of online boards, media hubs, and early social media platforms which, as intermediaries, facilitated and fostered user participation, as media scholar Tarleton Gillespie summarises:
These services were meant to “solve” some of the challenges of navigating the open web. They substantially simplified the tools needed for posting, distributing, sharing, commenting; they linked users to a larger, even global audience; and they did so at an appealing price. They also had acute network effects: if you want to share and participate, you want to do so where there are people to share and participate with.5
With regard to video content, YouTube, founded in 2005 and acquired by Google in 2006, became the central platform to curate, interlink, and encourage user participation. As one of many emergent websites that focussed on aspects of sharing and networking, the launch of YouTube falls into the time of an overall diagnosis of a “Web 2.0” – a term which denotes the new networked and participatory condition of the world wide web, enabled by the emergence of sites and applications focussed on user-led creativity and sharing.6 As YouTube, as a platform, mainly affords the storage, taxonomic organisation, and dispersion of video content, contributors to its stream of audiovisual content necessarily interact with and depend upon other platforms, applications, and technologies. For one, content spreads across social networks through cross-promotion or adaptations of and references to popular forms and formats that emerged on other platforms such as TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, etc. Secondly, and more importantly, contributions rely on mobile and computing devices and software for digital image manipulation as well as audio and video recording and editing. Different from mobile-oriented platforms like TikTok and Instagram with their built-in editing tools and filters, co-creativity on YouTube is more strongly shaped through desktop computing technologies and applications. However, since the 2010s, the use of mobile devices, particularly with regard to short self-captures and everyday observations, has massively increased and continues to pre-format and inspire practices of musical co-creativity and collaboration on the platform. In order to make describable aesthetic figurations against the backdrop of ongoing processes of remediation, my analyses take into account the ways in which YouTube-situated practices of re-composition are afforded and affected by the functionalities of digital devices, (low- and no-budget) editing and recording tools, production software, and scorewriters.
Instant access to freely circulating media objects as well as the material affordances of digital recording devices and editing software facilitate media environments that are characterised by ongoing communal negotiations of meaning. Via repetitive and imitative activity, difference is introduced on the grounds of a shared repertoire of cultural references. Regarding aspects of historicity, Felix Stalder draws a direct line from networked referential practices to earlier forms of remix, as both, in his perception, do not distance themselves from the past but “refer explicitly to precursors and to existing material,” thereby constituting “both one’s own position and the context and cultural tradition that is being carried on in one’s own work.”7 However, while it might be true that media remixes in the digital condition usually render pre-existing material recognisable, the awareness of the historicity of the reiterated or appropriated material can become secondary or even irrelevant. This can be elaborated against the backdrop of a concept by Georgina Born which helps imagine (musical) re-composition in digital environments: in view of digital music distribution and its effects on musical re-creation, Born developed the idea of creative relay, stating that “[d]istributed across space, time and persons, music can become an object of recurrent decomposition, composition and re-composition by a series of creative agents.”8 Her concept implies the multilinear fashion in which media objects spread and become continually re-composed. In processes of relayed creativity, there exists no precondition for the uptake of pre-existing material apart from the fact that it should be accessible and available as a digital file. Chains of associative and imitative re-creation in networked digital environments are potentially clouding the original historical context of pre-existing audiovisual material, which becomes part of an ongoing performative re-contextualisation and re-imagination without beginning and end. While Eduardo Navas, in this context, postulates a new form of remix, namely the “regenerative remix” which “takes places when Remix becomes embedded materially in culture in non-linear and ahistorical fashion,”9 Thomas Wilke highlights the prominent mashup character of Internet-situated transformations to media objects, pointing to the multiple heterogeneous sources in referential re-compositions – especially in audiovisual media environments like YouTube – which are performatively recombined and convey meaning only in the form of associative montage. Here, the term of mashup is not only used to concretise the heterogeneity and simultaneity of pre-existing material in referential practices, but also to denote the fundamental shift from historical forms of remix which lies in the performativity of continual re-contextualisation and re-combination of media objects – and their less privileged status as discursive objects: “Media objects are not exclusively steering the discourse anymore but become a constituent of the discourse’s productive conditions of possibility. The radical shift lies in the realisation of a possibility, the continuation of which leads to an extensive pluralisation.”10 In this understanding, mashup becomes more than a sub-category of remix: it rather serves as a historically “neutral” metaphor for the primacy of combinatorial and re-contextualising approaches to media objects in a digital condition characterised by an uncontrollable and unenclosed nexus of references. An externalised and transparent “tissue of quotations,” it encourages users to create “texts that exist entirely of pointers to other texts that are already on the Web.”11 Due to semiotic overabundance, co-creative approaches focussed on selecting, re-combining, and re-arranging are necessary to make up for the lack of fixed causal or temporal linkings – and to enable connectability within an environment of networked creativity. According to Andreas Reckwitz, the “computer subject,” which navigates the hypertext and the unenclosed symbolic sphere of the Internet, is thus necessarily elective, experimental, and aesthetically imaginative; its practices are characterised by an exploring attitude.12 With regard to communally oriented (musical) (co)creation, YouTube does not only provide the means to share, participate, and become visible. Due to the platform’s archival function – although it rather resembles a barely framed “jumbled attic” than an archive, as Simon Reynolds notes13 – it is itself oversaturated with media objects and thus “naturally” suggests and perpetuates performative combinatorial approaches to pre-existing audiovisual figurations.
Of course, these referential creative processes are not limited to mashup techniques, as the term – in its common, non-metaphorical usage – only denotes technologically enabled re-appropriations and re-combinations of multiple pre-existing audio and video files. Rather, they also include audiologovisual textual production beyond the montage and manipulation of digital media. For instance, YouTube-specific re-arrangements, cover versions, and parodic uptakes of musical pieces, videos, or video formats can exist without the re-appropriation of concrete found (musical) media objects; yet, they are situated within a transtextual fabric which they performatively engage with by way of multimodal reference such as allusion or imitation. In this context, aspects of interplay between visuals, musical reference, bodily performance, and the use of language are central to my analytical approach towards audiologovisual figurations, as they point to a shared repertoire of formal and performative elements attributed to musical and music-related forms, formats, and genres that circulate on the platform. Any digital unit situated within communally oriented processes of meaning-making is affected by the intersubjective recognition and reading of overarching and circulating multimodal text(s). Gérard Genette’s idea of an imitative text, or “mimotext,” which he derived with regard to the field of literature, might be useful in this context: As Genette points out, a text “can be imitated only indirectly, by practicing its style in another text.”14 Hence, referential creative processes – regardless of whether they are media mashups or not – are never based on direct imitation, that is, on the reproduction of another unit; rather, they rely on generalisations of specific stylistic and thematic features. As my analyses are going to highlight, the iteration and (inter)subjective recognition of communally established musical forms and formats lets emerge shared “models of competence” which afford the successful performance of the generalised “idiolect(s)” attributed to certain (micro)genres and remixable concepts of vernacular musical re-composition.
Overall, iterative musical practices in social media are stimulated by a “read/write” condition that blurs the boundaries between producers and consumers. A perpetual read/write activity is enabled by the “many-to-many” communication channels in social media, the underlying hierarchies of which, especially those pertaining to the curation and control of data, are concealed in favour of an empowerment of each single user to actively contribute. Lawrence Lessig coined the term “Read/Write culture” (or RW culture) to conceptually set apart participatory Internet culture from 20th century “Read Only culture” (or RO culture) of traditional mass media, which are characterised by professionalised creative production with an authoritative source as well as far-reaching material and legal restrictions that prevent the emergence of widespread performative textual productivity on the part of consumers. His example of the early blogosphere gives an impression how read/write activity in the world wide web was harnessed and fostered by new tools: while Lessig likened early blogs to “public diaries,” as people were “posting their thoughts into an apparently empty void,” the read/write character became enhanced through the implementation of possibilites to comment and, more importantly, to interlink and render the content traceable by way of tags and ranking systems.15
