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| "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.
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