This blog page is entirely devoted to the book, YouTube: Online Video and Participatory
Culture. The book was written by Jean Burgess and Joshua Green.
In the book, the authors analyze videos to find out how
YouTube is being used by audiences, traditional media users, amateur users, and
other communities. They use this analysis to challenge existing ideas about the
uses of YouTube for production and consumption in today’s culture.
Overall, Burgess and Green make some very interesting points
and they use plenty of data and outside sources to back up their ideas. They
also do an excellent job of referring back to points made earlier in the book
to tie it all together.
If I had to make one criticism for this book it would be:
the book is very condensed. This is nice because it makes it a short read, but
overall it is detrimental because on several occasions I got bogged down while
reading. Also, on a few occasions they seemed to refer to another work by name
as though they were expecting the reader to have already read that piece.
You might think that my analysis is quite lengthy for a book
that only has 140 pages; however, the book is so dense, so thorough, and makes
such a wide variety of points that to do it any kind of justice, an analysis
cannot be brief. Though this analysis is quite long, I still will only touch on
approximately ½ of the book’s content.
Burgess and Green begin the first chapter by laying out a
little background knowledge for the reader.
YouTube was launched in 2005 with the aim to remove
technical barriers to the wide spread sharing of videos online. In 2006,
YouTube was purchased by Google for $1.65 billion.
When YouTube was launched in 2005 it received little
fanfare. So how has it grown to be one of the most popular video sharing
websites of all time? Burgess and Green say there are three myths that surround
the site’s emergence:
1.An
article was written about YouTube on the website TechCrunch. This put the
website on many “geek’s” radar.
2.YouTube
implemented four key features: video recommendations, email links, enabled
commenting, and added an embeddable video player.
3.Lazy Sunday, a popular Saturday Night
Live sketch was uploaded to the site illegally and received millions of views.
No one knows for sure which, if any, of these three myths is
correct, but Burgess and Green point out that each creates a different idea
about what YouTube should be used for.
1.A
site for geeks
2.A
site for sharing videos with others
3.A
site for piracy and file sharing
In the beginning, it seemed that not even YouTube itself knew
what exactly it should be used for. It claimed to be a storage facility for
video content, but most people think of it as a platform for public
self-expression.
Today, Burgess and Green categorize YouTube as a
meta-business, a site that distributes content, but doesn’t actually create any
content itself. However, meta-businesses enhance the value of information so
that it benefits the original creators. Websites like YouTube give users a
chance to garner wide exposure.
With meta-businesses like YouTube, participatory culture is
not a gimmick; “it is absolutely core business” (6). The site simply cannot
function without the participation of its users, but on YouTube there are often
conflicts between two different types of users.
ØThere are the top-down users. The traditional
media providers. Large corporations and brand names that supply clips,
trailers, and promotional advertisements to the site.
ØThere are also the bottom-up users. The
grass-roots, everyday people who upload homemade or edited videos to the site.
These two groups tend not to like each other. The top-down
users think that bottom-up users steal their content and benefit from their
hard work. The bottom-up users think that top-down users are ruining the site
and pushing them to the outskirts where they can be neither seen nor heard.
Burgess and Green point out that participatory culture is a
term that is used to talk about the link between more accessible digital
technologies, user created content, and a shift in the power relations between
media industries and their consumers. However, the economic and cultural
rearrangements that participatory culture stands for are disruptive and
uncomfortable for all participants involved. This reinforces what they said
before, the two groups of users tend not to like each other. Top-down users
want copyright protection, revenue, and to disable commenting on their uploads
while bottom-up users cry out that they are censoring creativity and destroying
the idea of community that they believe YouTube was founded upon.
Burgess and Green use their first chapter to give a brief
overview of what is to come. They sum up the chapter by saying, “YouTube
illustrates the increasingly complex relations among producers and consumers in
the creation of meaning, value, and agency” (14).
Burgess and Green’s second chapter engages with debates by
using thematic analysis of mainstream media coverage of YouTube.
Burgess and Green say that the media tends to frame YouTube
as either:
ØA lawless repository
for user content
ØA big player in a new economy
These frames make for news stories that always seem to
cluster around:
ØCelebrities, youth,
and morality
ØMedia business and copyright laws
Burgess and Green believe that “media discourse – whether celebratory,
condemnatory, or somewhere in between – cannot help but both reflect and shape
the meaning of new media forms as they evolve” (15). Burgess and Green state
that they are not aiming to say that mainstream media discourses about YouTube
are wrong, but rather they want to provide alternative perspectives on the
matter.
Something the authors point out struck me as very odd: “One
of the most striking things about mainstream reporting of YouTube is the degree
to which these matters of concern conflict” (16). They go on to say that
current affairs programs would one day praise YouTube as a site of “wacky,
weird, and wonderful user-generated content” (16), and a few days later, the
same program would say it is “an under-regulated site of lawless, unethical,
and pathological behavior” (16).
This leads Burgess and Green to a discussion of media
panics. “In press coverage, YouTube is often used to express familiar anxieties
about young people and digital media, especially in relation to the risks, uses
and misuses of [the] Internet” (17). Young people are connected to media
through metaphors of newness and change and this leads adults to believe in an “intergenerational
digital divide” where youths are assumed to be YouTube’s default users.
This relates to the idea of the digital native that we
learned about in class. James Sturm touches on the idea of the digital native
in his blog “Life Without the Web”. He believes that for digital natives or
youths the internet “is like a body part” (4). Because they grew up with
technology youths or digital natives are just assumed to be the prominent users
of YouTube, but in a later part of the book Burgess and Green point out “the
most prominent lead users . . . are adults in their twenties or thirties” (72).
It also relates to the idea of the digital divide that we
discussed in class. The digital divide we learned about was concerned with
access. The worry was that those without access were falling behind. With the
intergenerational digital divide, access still plays a part but it is more
concerned with participation and literacy. Burgess and Green explore this point
further in Chapter 4.
Burgess and Green move on to discuss some points brought up
by the media. One man claimed that on YouTube large amounts of sinister content
were only a few clicks away. He believe youths are agents who post the content
but also victims who are exposed to gruesome and harmful footage. Others point
to stories about cyberbullying (using digital technologies to bully). One man
even wrote a book saying that YouTube and participatory culture was eroding intellect
and moral standards. In response to these points Burgess and Green point out
that many of these same concerns “emerged around the pauper press . . . and the
emergence of the portable hand camera” (20). They also point out the fact that
many of “the offending videos uncovered by journalists had very few views
before their exposure in the national or international press” (21). The
reporting itself is drawing attention to the videos. Overall, Burgess and Green
found that in many cases the amount of “sinister content” was overstated.
The next subtopic of the chapter is The Meanings of Amateur
Video. Burgess and Green found that with YouTube people often assumed that if
they posted footage of their raw talent on the site they could achieve
legitimate success and fame (like the band OK Go), but these people don’t
realize that they still need to have the ability to pass through the “gate-keeping
mechanisms” of traditional media culture (i.e. getting a recording contract or
filming a TV pilot). People who become popular on YouTube may be stars, but
that does not necessarily mean they are a celebrity.
Band, OK Go, performing "This too Shall Pass"
OK Go was able to get past the "gate-keeping mechanisms"
It’s actually kind of astounding how certain videos become “viral”.
Some of the most popular videos are about very mundane, everyday things. But
Burgess and Green believe that is why people like them “because it’s reality .
. .[they are] so spontaneous and natural” (26). Audiences seem to put
themselves in the position of the user. This also explains why audiences dislike
users who “break the code” so to speak. Burgess and Green use the example of
LonelyGirl15 who captured the hearts of millions and in the end turned out to
be a complete fake with scripted content. Audiences have come to expect a
certain amount of authenticity in videos.
Burgess and Green also make it a point to say how mainstream
media neglects to see YouTube as a social network. Media seems to assume that
self-promotion is the only type of motivation behind content creation; but in
reality many of the users upload content to take part of the social networking
community on the site.
But, above all else, YouTube and mainstream media interact
the most when it comes to copyright infringement. One of the three myths of
YouTube’s creation (Chapter 1) was that it was to be a site for illegal file sharing.
A big problem YouTube has is that it is expanding so rapidly that it has
trouble creating and/or enforcing digital rights management strategies. Traditional
media companies are not happy about this. Burgess and Green note that there
appears to be an “always-looming avalanche of lawsuits that might, at any
moment, bring the company to its knees” (31). Despite all the copyright
lawsuits, YouTube has been able to make some revenue sharing deals with big
media companies.
Burgess and Green move on to say that in participatory
culture the rules around copyright infringement and piracy tend to get a little
fuzzy. Many users utilize a process called redaction which is “the production
of new material by the process of editing existing content” (35). Some argue
that this is not copyright infringement it is a process of “enunciative
productivity”.
In summary, Burgess and Green state that though YouTube is
gradually “becoming incorporated as a mainstream part of the cultural public
sphere” (36), mainstream media still does not seem exactly sure just what
YouTube is for. Burgess and Green believe that it is helpful to understand
YouTube as occupying an institutional function that “operates as a coordinating
mechanism between individual and collective creativity” (37).
Before writing this book, Burgess and Green selected 4,320
videos over a three month time frame. These videos were from the categories:
most favorite, most viewed, most discussed, and most responded. They analyzed
the content but also looked at the way particular types of videos moved through
the system in an attempt to find significant patterns.
When analyzing the videos they took note of what the videos
appear to be and where they appear to be from to see how content might be perceived
and function within the site. They selected the videos from the four categories
(listed above) so that they could compare across categories to get a sense of
the way different kinds of video were made popular by audiences.
Actual Charts from the Book
Under the subtopic of The Two YouTubes, Burgess and Green
again bring up the two frameworks that coexist in the site:
ØTop-down framework (traditional media)
ØBottom-up framework (user-created content)
About 50% of the content they analyzed was user-created. 42%
was from traditional media sources, and the other 8% was of uncertain origin or
had been removed before analysis was complete. Burgess and Green then spend
significant time breaking down the four categories and analyzing which types of
videos show up in each. In the end, they report that “there is a great deal of
slippage between the categories of traditional media and user-created content”
(47).
Moving onto Clips and Quotes: Uses of Traditional Media
Content, Burgess and Green report that YouTube really only makes sense if it is
seen as something people use in everyday life. Utilizing the framework of participatory
culture, audiences can respond to culture without going to auxiliary media
sources.
YouTube is filled with short “quotes” of content that users
share to draw attention to programs. They are not intended to be seen as an
attempt at file sharing, but rather as a way people can “catch up on public
media events . . . break news stories, and raise awareness” (49). At the time
of the research (2007/2008) there were also vast amounts of presidential
campaign footage because YouTube was a site where both top-down and grass roots
campaigning could occur.
YouTube can help you see what you missed:
A short clip from the President's response to the Connecticut shooting.
Blogger, Jenna Mourey, isn't afraid to go there.
Burgess and Green then move on to talk about the vlog which
is almost an emblematic form of YouTube participation. Vlogs are the
cornerstone of participatory culture because creators address the audience
directly, they invite feedback, discussion, and debate more than any other
video type that Burgess and Green could find. Vlogs were also on occasion used
as business ventures.
At the end, Burgess and Green report that to understand
YouTube it is helpful not to draw a sharp line between user-created content of
professional/traditional content. YouTube is more easily thought of as a
continuum of cultural participation where everyone who uploads content is a
participant and all activities of content creators and audiences are practices
of participation.
As you can probably tell from the title, in this chapter
Burgess and Green discuss YouTube’s social networking functions. They believe
that “content creation is probably far less significant than the uses of that
content within various social network settings” (58).
"I have so many friends!!"
Though the majority of people are much more likely to just
watch videos on YouTube than they are to login or create videos, many of the
site’s users do use YouTube as a social networking site where video content is
the main vehicle of communication. The people who use the site in this fashion
are part of YouTube’s “social core”. These members are very important actors in
YouTube’s attention economy.
YouTube is a patron of collective creativity that partially
controls the conditions under which creative content is “produced, ordered, and
re-presented” (60). However, the purposes and meanings of YouTube as a cultural
system are co-created by users.
As a patron, YouTube “provides the supporting and constraining
mechanisms of a system whose meaning is generated by the uses to which the
website is put, and within which, collectively, users exercise agency” (61).
Political implications of this are still undecided, but some argue that it has
damaging implications for the working conditions of already underpaid creative
practitioners. Overall, YouTube’s number one role is to be a platform provider.
It is hard to examine participatory culture because the
frameworks that were used to analyze traditional media economies are not very
helpful. There are “economic transformations that accompany these new models of
user-participation in cultural production” (62). Burgess and Green point out
that participatory media economies can introduce a form of creative
destruction.
We have seen creative destruction before in this class. In Jefferson
Cowie’s “The Distances in Between”, we see that creative destruction is the “[simultaneous]
wreck of the old [to] make way for the new” (181). That is very similar to what
Burgess and Green are describing. As participatory culture emerges it is destroying
the old frameworks of traditional media to pave the way for new frameworks.
These new frameworks are needed because in participatory culture participants
all have mixed motivations and work for a range of benefits (62).
Under the subtopic of YouTubers as Innovators, Burgess and
Green marvel at the fact that community activities on YouTube take place in a
setting that was not primarily designed for the purpose. The site does not “overtly
invite community building, collaboration, or purposeful group work” (63). In
fact, many novice users of the site cannot even locate the community spaces of
the site even though the site has been claimed as being “famously usable”.
It’s true, YouTube is preferred by many users because of its
extreme usability, but Burgess and Green point out that with extreme usability
comes extreme hackability and YouTube has to try to strike a balance between
the two.
Though the site was not originally designed to be a
community site, a number of innovative uses of YouTube have originated in the user
community. Many members of the social core would use consistent user names
across many websites to effectively make it a plug-in for YouTube. This helped
social core users build their brand name by being “always on”. Arguably, one of
the biggest benefits of the site is its permeability, or its ability to seamlessly
link to other social networking sites.
Success on YouTube appears to be gained by exploiting
site-specific competencies which stems from understanding how the system works.
Burgess and Green believe that in order to understand how sites like YouTube
function, one must be digitally literate. They state, “digital literacy is one
of the central problems of participatory culture.” (70). They believe that
although the digital divide remains a problem, debates have shifted to address
the participation gap. At the heart of this gap lies a matter of literacy.
Earlier this semester we saw in “Literacy and Stratification
at the Twenty-First Century” by Deborah Brandt that it appears “the rich get
richer, [and] the literate get more literate” (169). The same is true in the
case of digital literacy. New Media literacy is “the ability to access,
understand, and create communications in a variety of contexts” (71). Those who
are digitally literate can very easily learn new technologies and adapt to the
ever changing world and leave those who are not in the dust. “Being literate in
the context of YouTube . . . means not only being able to create and consume
video content, but also being able to comprehend the way YouTube works as a set
of technologies and as a social network” (72).
However, Burgess and Green do give hope to those who are not
digitally literate. They state that these competencies are not natural
attributes that digital natives are born with; they are a set of skills that
are achieved through active and creative participation.
Burgess and Green close this chapter by telling users that
creating an online presence and learning to be digitally literate takes time,
patience, and persistence, but they are very enthusiastic about the informal
learning opportunities the YouTube makes possible.
" There are informal learning opportunities on YouTube?!?!"
Above all, “YouTube is a commercial enterprise. But it is
also a platform designed to enable cultural participation by ordinary citizens”
(75). The site’s value is partially generated by the collective creativity of
users and audiences. In the world of online video distribution, YouTube
dominates.
In the beginning of this chapter, Burgess and Green explore
whether or not YouTube’s domination poses a threat to alternative community
media spaces.
YouTube has always been first and foremost a business. It
built an audience for advertising by creating a community for video sharing. In
the grand scheme of things, the commercial drive behind the site may have opened
the door to a wider range of participants than ever before.
YouTube is also a website that is large enough to “count as a
significant mediating mechanism for the cultural public sphere” (77). The
website enables encounters with people of different cultures and can spark the
development of “political listening”. It is from popular culture websites like
YouTube that we draw much of the wool from which the social tapestry is knit
(77).
Websites like YouTube let people see where they fit in the
bigger picture. Certain peer-to-peer websites “[constitute] a form of cultural
citizenship . . . the terms of this citizenship have the potential to run head
to head with established political citizenship” because community and
participation are two prerequisites for the enactment of cultural citizenship
(78).
Websites like YouTube also offer a place to discuss and
debate sensitive issues. Burgess and Green give the example of transgender
people sharing intimate moments of their lives to expose a difficult issue, and
that by sharing these moments, discussions can begin and social boundaries and
assumptions can be refashioned.
Burgess and Green believe that the idea of commercial websites
organized around entertainment being able to contribute to such worth ideals is
not actually that far-fetched because so much of the symbolic material
distributed through YouTube comes from the everyday lives of ordinary citizens
(79). Websites like YouTube are creating a space of globalization. It is a
space where you can virtually cross borders and see things you might not
otherwise see from perspectives of people you might not otherwise encounter
(83).
However, this globalization may be being limited by some
features installed by YouTube that are intended to be helpful. Burgess and
Green say that YouTube is in the process of “localizing” YouTube, or making it
so that the content in ranked compared to its relevance to your location. They also
hypothesize that YouTube may be working in conjunction with national
governments to silently filter content (i.e. filtering out hate speeches to
German users)
Out of all the things YouTube can be used for, one of the
most widely reported uses is using it to recapture memories from one’s
childhood. Though YouTube never intended to be, it acts as a cultural archive.
It is a place where vintage music and videos meets contemporary pop culture.
YouTube is unfiltered and disordered which makes it a perfect place for content
like this to gather. It is a place where users can act as curators and historians.
Oh the memories....
This puts real historians on edge. Historians worry that
YouTube’s archives are not sustainable and that content may be deleted because
it is thought to be of little value. However, they are not allowed to “re-archive
the archives” due to YouTube’s existing terms and conditions policies.
Under the subtopic of Controversies in the YouTube Community,
Burgess and Green explore the conflicts that arise between bottom-up users and
top-down users. These controversies have roots all the way back in the creation
of YouTube. Since no one really knew exactly what it was for, users decided it
should be about community and traditional media companies decided they wanted
to use it as a distribution platform.
Users argue that they are being pushed under the rug so to
speak. They are being pushed to the side so the site can promote its big
content users. They argue that big media companies are ruining the community,
killing diversity, and stealing viewers. One user even states that they have no
need to be there because they don’t seem to have any trouble broadcasting
themselves (92).
However, Burgess and Green point out that YouTube needs
these big media companies. With big media comes advertising and revenue. The
site needs this revenue because “YouTube was spending millions on the computer
power and bandwidth necessary to provide this free service to the uploaders and
viewers” (92).
Burgess and Green conclude this chapter by stating that
YouTube would be wise to give more attention to its bottom-up users. They are
the users that made the site what it is today and the sites ability to produce
value relies entirely on them. Without the users the site would be nothing.
With their final chapter, Burgess and Green contemplate what
the future might hold for YouTube. Again there are two very different versions
about what the site could possibly be for:
ØThe playful exhibition of the awesome speed and
creativity of viral web culture
ØOr a cultural public sphere where conversations,
self-mediated representation, and encounters with difference can occur on
popular terms (103).
Again, these two different versions stem from the idea that
when YouTube was created no one had any idea what is was for.
Since YouTube launched without a specifically defined
purpose, it is now of tremendous scale and diversity in uses today. The
light-touch or somewhat “laissez faire” governance allows users to express
their creativity within very relaxed boundaries. Because of these characteristics,
the site can be almost whatever users want it to be.
This calls into question the site’s sustainability. Today,
YouTube is the dominant online video platform, but that doesn’t guarantee that
it always will be. Burgess and Green point out that YouTube dominates the idea of what a video sharing site should
be; that is why so many websites try to emulate it. However, if another site
where to make a “better” interface, YouTube may fall off its precarious perch
at the top.
If YouTube were a cat, this would be it.
Burgess and Green conclude their book by giving readers
something to contemplate:
Which realities? Which do we want
to make more real, and which ones less real? How do we want to interfere (because
interfere we will, one way or another)? The present and future realties of participatory
culture are not under the control of any one group . . . Through each act of
participation . . . participatory culture is being co-created every day . . .
but the question for all of us is the same. How do we want to interfere?” (108)
