Reconstruction 9.3 (2009)
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Burgess, Jean & Joshua Green. YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture. With contributions by Henry Jenkins and John Hartley. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009. 172 pp. US $19.95.
<1> In YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture, Jean Burgess and Joshua Green subtly uncover what proves to be a slippery and mutable object. They caution against those who would simplify YouTube's meaning by presenting it as mainly any one of the following: (1) a channel for distribution of content first produced for film and television; (2) a sign of the inevitable demise of broadcast media, and a provocation to those who want to drain the last dregs of profit from existing intellectual properties; (3) an outlet for every zany underground community's self-articulation; (4) the latest instance of a perennial folk cultural impulse; or (5) a manifestation of the self-regarding zeitgeist of Web 2.0's "participatory turn," as you scramble to make your presence felt online, enjoined to "Broadcast Yourself" by YouTube Inc.'s sloganeers.
<2> In countering these approaches, Burgess and Green provide a compelling description of YouTube's changing guises and applications since its 2005 launch and 2006 purchase by Google; they nuance and critique the competing frameworks brought to bear on the site by mainstream news sources, users, and the corporate media behemoths who seek to regulate how and if "their" content can appear on the site; and they interpret the findings of their own survey of more than 4000 videos that YouTube listed (and thus helped foster) as "most popular" between August and November 2007.
<3> Resulting from these inquiries is, at its broadest, an image of YouTube as a media system and a meaning-making process. More particularly, we find a platform for and aggregator of content that is often user-created or at least user-generated, since for every video blog ("vlog") or home movie there is a piece of traditional media that a fan has gathered, edited, reworked and/or spliced with other materials. We find a highly usable video sharing system that achieved massive popularity due to some particularly clever and timely design features (embeddable video, for instance, which proved particularly attractive to burgeoning ranks of bloggers). Helped along by extensive circulation of a few choice clips, and by celebrification of some core vloggers (such as Lonelygirl15, whose fame grew as people wondered whether she was a real person or a media construct), YouTube has since become a community of users of unprecedented scale, and an outlet for "vernacular creativity" – less cultural production than social networking, or, perhaps more accurately, a site that allows for and enacts convergence between these two categories of behavior.
<4> We also find, of course, a money-making venture that provides audiences to advertisers by "enabling" users to share videos and forge ties (76). As a business it is supremely interesting to the holders of rights to mainstream media properties. For them YouTube is at once a source of anxiety and aspiration, as users appear in duplicitous guise: they are at once lawless pirates and model consumers, so intimately invested in traditional media that they use their creative energies to continuously applaud, adapt, reframe and respond to it, and their level of interest in the site's design and future becomes fuel for its ongoing elaboration and renovation.
<5> In one view these people might be deemed, quite simply, "lead users": they are core participants in the work of co-creating YouTube's value and imagining the innovative applications that YouTube Inc. then reflexively incorporates. In another view, of course, co-creation by the users who upload content, and by the communities forming around that content, simply epitomizes the process whereby fans provide free labor to corporations only too happy to host them. If value is not produced by YouTube Inc., is it nevertheless produced for it, and does that matter? If the consumer is "a dynamic site of innovation and growth" rather than an "end point in an economic chain of production" (13), does that signal her incorporation into the cycle of production, as the fan's committed attention becomes the corporation's ultimate object of desire?
<6> Instead of providing definitive answers to these questions, Burgess and Green present YouTube as precisely the phenomenon that instigates them and keeps renewing their challenge. It is as a "mediator" between audience-based and industry-orientated practices and rationales that YouTube evidently compels them. The professional and the amateur blur around YouTube. Corporations meet and court but cannot quite annex its "unruly and emergent" communities of users (76). Commerce and community become continuous, that is, they come to form a "continuum of cultural participation" (57) that is also a tangled web.
<7> To their great credit, Burgess and Green find in this web ample reason to avoid fetishistic celebration of "participation" as a good in and of itself. YouTube has undeniably become a space for articulation of cultural citizenship, for a politics not of rights and obligations but of cultural recognition, what they call "practices and collectivities that form around matters of shared interest, identity and concern" (77). Still, Burgess and Green voice some concern about the fact that increased access to, engagement in, and diversity of media production and consumption has been facilitated by commercial interests – YouTube Inc., Google – that profit grandly from users' free play and interaction, and that have thereby come to hold private control over a sizeable archive of the popular cultural practices enacted and valorized by online collectivities. They are admittedly reluctant to credit "more literal versions of labor-based critiques" (62) – and I struggle to imagine which theorists might populate this category – yet their discussion of YouTube Inc. finding value in users creating for a "range of benefits," that is autonomously, freely, and often unmotivated by financial incentives, seems to me to lend the credence of concrete detail to resolutely labor-based theories of immaterial production, which tend also to share Burgess's and Green's sense that the political implications of these currents remain uncertain. [1]
<8> In sum, though it presents itself in a relatively modest light – as a brief attempt to define the meanings and uses of YouTube – this book is also an accessible guide to some of the structuring tensions that have arisen now that media corporations systematically appropriate and monetize audience participation. Indeed, Burgess and Green suggest that what actually makes YouTube is this commingling of commercial and non-commercial practices, and of corporate and anti-corporate regimes of value – a commingling that is by turns harmonious or acrimonious, welcome or pernicious, and whose outcomes have not yet been decided.
Notes
[1] For an early and complete articulation see Maurizio Lazzarato, "Immaterial Labor," in Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, eds. Paulo Virno and Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 133-146. For a more recent assessment and application see Tiziana Terranova, Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age (London: Pluto Press, 2004).
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