Chapter 6 - YouTube's Uncertain Futures

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:

Ø  The playful exhibition of the awesome speed and creativity of viral web culture

Ø  Or 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)