YouTube E-Book

Jean Burgess

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: DMS - Digital Media and Society
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 287

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

YouTube is one of the most well-known and widely discussed sites of participatory media in the contemporary online environment, and it is the first genuinely mass-popular platform for user-created video. In this timely and comprehensive introduction to how YouTube is being used and why it matters, Burgess and Green discuss the ways that it relates to wider transformations in culture, society and the economy.
The book critically examines the public debates surrounding the site, demonstrating how it is central to struggles for authority and control in the new media environment. Drawing on a range of theoretical sources and empirical research, the authors discuss how YouTube is being used by the media industries, by audiences and amateur producers, and by particular communities of interest, and the ways in which these uses challenge existing ideas about cultural ‘production’ and ‘consumption’.
Rich with both concrete examples and featuring specially commissioned chapters by Henry Jenkins and John Hartley, the book is essential reading for anyone interested in the contemporary and future implications of online media. It will be particularly valuable for students and scholars in media, communication and cultural studies.

Leseprobe

YouTube

YouTube

Online Video and Participatory Culture

JEAN BURGESS AND JOSHUA GREEN

With contributions by

HENRY JENKINS AND JOHN HARTLEY

polity

Copyright © Jean Burgess and Joshua Green 2009

The right of Jean Burgess and Joshua Green to be identified as Authors of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2009 by Polity Press

Polity Press

65 Bridge Street

Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press

350 Main Street

Malden, MA 02148, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-5889-6

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Typeset in 10.25 on 13 pt FF Scala

by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire

Printed and bound in the United States by Maple-Vail

The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.

Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publishers will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

For further information on Polity, visit our website: www.politybooks.com

  Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

1   How YouTube Matters

2   YouTube and the Mainstream Media

3   YouTube’s Popular Culture

4   YouTube’s Social Network

5   YouTube’s Cultural Politics

6   YouTube’s Uncertain Futures

Henry Jenkins: What Happened Before YouTube

John Hartley: Uses of YouTube – Digital Literacy and the Growth of Knowledge

Notes

References

Index

Preface

Love it or loathe it, YouTube is now part of the mainstream media landscape, and a force to be reckoned with in contemporary popular culture. Although it isn’t the only video-sharing website on the Internet, YouTube’s rapid rise, diverse range of content, and public prominence in the Western, English-speaking world make it useful for understanding the evolving relationships between new media technologies, the creative industries, and the politics of popular culture. The aim of this book is to work through some of the often competing ideas about just what YouTube is, and what it might or might not turn out to be for.

The site’s value – what YouTube has turned out to be ‘for’ so far – is co-created by YouTube Inc., now owned by Google, the users who upload content to the website, and the audiences who engage around that content. The contributors are a diverse group of participants – from large media producers and rights-owners such as television stations, sports companies, and major advertisers, to small-to-medium enterprises looking for cheap distribution or alternatives to mainstream broadcast systems, cultural institutions, artists, activists, media literate fans, non-professional and amateur media producers. Each of these participants approaches YouTube with their own purposes and aims and collectively shape YouTube as a dynamic cultural system: YouTube is a site of participatory culture.

The fact that YouTube is co-created is not always apparent to either YouTube Inc. or the participants within the system. Indeed, as we argue throughout, many of these different participants engage with YouTube as if it is a space specifically designed for them and that should therefore serve their own particular interests, often without an appreciation of the roles played by others. This is the source of the many ongoing conflicts around the way that YouTube as a site of participatory culture should develop.

In the chapters that follow, we begin by looking at YouTube’s origins and the prehistory of the debates around it, contextualizing them within the politics of popular culture, especially in relation to the emergence of new media. Drawing on a survey of the website’s most popular content, we uncover some of the ways YouTube has been put to use, deploying this discussion to think through the implications of the practices of cultural participation that take place there, and their relationship to long-running debates about the place of media in everyday life.

Moving beyond the affordances of digital technologies and their potential to enable active cultural participation, YouTube also presents us with an opportunity to confront some of participatory culture’s most pressing problems: the unevenness of participation and voice; the apparent tensions between commercial interests and the public good; and the contestation of ethics and social norms that occurs as belief systems, interests, and cultural differences collide. In the later chapters we focus on some of the most important new debates around the creative industries, the new media, and the new economy: user-led innovation, amateur production, and questions of labour; the apparent tensions between global connectedness and commercial monopolies; and definitions of new media literacy.

At the conclusion of the book are two specially commissioned essays, one by Henry Jenkins and one by John Hartley. They look outward from our detailed study of YouTube, which is grounded in the contemporary moment, to provide more expansive explorations of the challenges and opportunities developments like YouTube represent to some of the central areas of concern in media and cultural studies, past, present, and future. Jenkins asks us to remember the often under-acknowledged prehistories of YouTube that are to be found in minority, activist, and alternative media, in order better to understand the potential and limits of YouTube to support cultural diversity. John Hartley’s concluding chapter casts an even wider net, situating YouTube within the longue durée history of media, popular literacy, and the public. It addresses the question of the extent to which user-created, self-mediated expression is capable of being ‘scaled up’ to contribute to a more inclusive cultural public sphere and the growth of knowledge.

Acknowledgments

It is common practice these days to acknowledge that academic books are produced out of collective rather than individual effort, but in this case it is especially true. This book is not only the result of a collaboration between authors; it is also the outcome of a longstanding and fruitful partnership between two institutions on opposite sides of the planet – Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston. The research project that informed this book was supported by the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation and the Creative Industries Faculty at QUT, and the Program in Comparative Media Studies (CMS) at MIT. Additionally, some of the data we draw on throughout this book were collected as part of a project completed by the Convergence Culture Consortium. The Consortium is a partnership between CMS and MTV Networks, Yahoo!, Turner Broadcasting, Fidelity Investments, and GSD&M Idea City.

We need to offer special thanks to the diligent coders who worked on gathering data with us: Sam Ford, Eleanor Baird, Lauren Silberman, Xiaochang Li, Ana Domb Krauskopf, and Eli Koger. We are grateful to them not only for their hard work but also for their intellectual engagement and spirited contributions to the project. We thank Rik Eberhardt at CMS for his help collecting and managing the data; Jenny Burton for last-minute editorial assistance; and Paul Brand for his research assistance as part of a QUT Creative Industries Faculty Vacation Research Experience Scholarship.

At Polity, we are grateful to our commissioning editor John Thompson for originally championing this project, to Andrea Drugan for supporting it as part of the Digital Media & Society series, and to Sarah Lambert for her assistance with the process. We would also like to express our thanks to the anonymous reviewers for their robust and valuable comments and suggestions.

Colleagues at our home institutions and around the world provided feedback, resources, difficult questions, or moral support: our thanks go to John Banks, Trine Bjørkmann Berry, Sarah Brouillette, Kate Crawford, Stuart Cunningham, Mark Deuze, Sam Ford, Anne Galloway, Melissa Gregg, Gerard Goggin, Jonathan Gray, Greg Hearn, Helen Klaebe, Kylie Jarrett, Robert Kozinets, Patricia Lange, Jason Potts, Alice Robison, Christina Spurgeon, and Graeme Turner.

Finally, we owe much to our co-authors and mentors Henry Jenkins and John Hartley, who have not only generously committed some of their ideas and energies to this book, but who have also encouraged and supported us to pursue the research collaboration of which this is the outcome.

Josh would like to thank his parents, his friends, and Allison Perlman for their support, and for forgiving his absences. Jean would like to thank her parents, her friends, and Julie Woodward for their steadfast support, and for not asking “How’s the book going?” more often than could be helped.

CHAPTER ONE

How YouTube Matters

Founded by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim, former employees of online commerce website PayPal, YouTube’s website was officially launched with little public fanfare in June 2005. The original innovation was a technological (but non-unique) one: YouTube was one of a number of competing services aiming to remove the technical barriers to the widespread sharing of video online. The website provided a very simple, integrated interface within which users could upload, publish, and view streaming videos without high levels of technical knowledge, and within the technological constraints of standard browser software and relatively modest bandwidth. YouTube set no limits on the number of videos users could upload, offered basic community functions such as the opportunity to link to other users as friends, and provided URLs and HTML code that enabled videos to be easily embedded into other websites, a feature that capitalized on the recent introduction of popularly accessible blogging technologies. With the exception of a limit on the duration of videos that could be uploaded, YouTube’s offerings were comparable to other online video start-ups at the time.1

Most versions of YouTube’s history conform to the Silicon Valley myth of the garage entrepreneur, where technological and business innovation comes from youthful visionaries working outside of established enterprises; where, out of humble origins in an office over a pizzeria with a paper sign on the door (Allison, 2006), a multi-billion dollar success story emerges. In this story, the moment of success arrived in October 2006, when Google acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion.2 By November 2007 it was the most popular entertainment website in Britain, with the BBC website in second place,3 and in early 2008 it was, according to various web metrics services, consistently in the top ten most visited websites globally.4 As of April 2008, YouTube hosted upwards of 85 million videos, a number that represents a tenfold increase over the previous year and that continues to increase exponentially. Internet market research company com-Score reported that the service accounted for 37 percent of all Internet videos watched inside the United States, with the next largest service, Fox Interactive Media, accounting for only 4.2 percent. As a user-created content community, its sheer size and mainstream popularity were unprecedented.