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.
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.
No comments:
Post a Comment