Chapter 1 - How YouTube Matters

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.

Ø  There are the top-down users. The traditional media providers. Large corporations and brand names that supply clips, trailers, and promotional advertisements to the site.

                            

Ø  There 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).