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I
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really like YouTube. You can find anything in
YouTube, or so it seems. YouTube is one of the websites I visit regularly. It
is on my Google Chrome bookmarks. I have an account and playlists there. And my
YouTube account is linked to my other social networks: Facebook and Twitter. In
this matter, if I ever like or comment about a video on YouTube it gets
published in my other virtual identities.
Nowadays is undeniable
that YouTube has become one of the main and most known social websites in the
whole Internet. YouTube as social phenomena has attracted scholars. Little of this was foreseen by Chad Hurley,
Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim when in 2005 they officially launched YouTube’s
website. YouTube is a website that aimed to remove the technical barriers to
the widespread sharing of video online, allowing users to upload, publish and
view streaming videos without high levels of technical knowledge (Burgess &
Green, 2009) . As social network, YouTube has four key
features: video recommendations, video sharing, comments and embeddable video
player. The innovation of YouTube was that you did not need to install or
download any application to play and share videos. Burgues & Green mention
that back in 2005 YouTube vaguely recognized itself as a place to show off and
blog videos to the world; videos of pets, the ones you take with your camera or
cell phone; videos of your friend and family and much more (2009, p. 3) . Nowadays they
promote themselves with the slogan “Broadcast yourself”, which implies that you
share not only your personal videos, but whatever that can be related to
yourself and your interests.
Throughout their
publication, Burgues & Green examine YouTube as a site of participatory and
convergence culture with the help of Henry Jenkins (they landmark in the
matter); YouTube as a public sphere and a matter of citizenship; and YouTube as
an accidental archive. As a site of
participatory culture, YouTube fits the definition of the web 2.0 that relies
on user-generated content, because the ones that use produce and upload videos,
are the ones that watch them. Burgues & Green pay special attention to the
implications of YouTube as a social network platform and how relations among
users are held. For instance, there is a reference to the controversy of
Oprah’s incursion to YouTube and the reaction from the YouTube community (pp. 90-94) . Basically, fans
declared the decease of the golden age of YouTube with the incursion of
corporative channels. Users apparently felt that the community they were
participating in was unrewarded; all their time spent building up a community
gave them no advantages over public figures as Oprah. Their sense of community
was then shacked, affected and put to test. Nowadays VEVO has a great
penetration in YouTube and host most of the Official channels of music stars.
These channels pay special attention to copyright issues and usually block and
report when common users infringe the copyright. This creates certain
frustration among users because videos constantly disappear and must be
relocated with different names, descriptions or accounts.
Out of the ideas that Burgues
& Green examine, the one that seemed more interesting to me is “The
accidental Archive”. They write a little
more than 3 pages of this topic, nonetheless it names perfectly what I find
more amusing and entertaining of YouTube.
Although the authors do not quote or mention how they got this information,
they affirm that to the question “what do you watch on YouTube?” people often
mention old music videos or forgotten TV commercials. In a way, what everyone
is trying to do is “recapture(ing) memories from their childhood or young
adulthood, navigating through related videos or keyword searches, often
discovering media moments they thought had been lost forever” (Burgess & Green, 2009, p. 87) . In this sense, the
authors foresee that if YouTube remains in existence, it will become a record
of contemporary culture. In my opinion, it has become already a record of who
we are now.
At certain point, I
became interested in how everything seems to be available in YouTube. In how
those TV series that I vaguely remembered had a space in YouTube, and how
everyone seemed interested in getting more videos of those memories. I became
interested then in finding how this nostalgia created bonds between users. I
found interesting how video responses were linked by a common memory: if you watched this, you surely watched this
one, come and comment.
YouTube is a place to hang out and remember, for finding memories and bond, for reinvent and restart, doing new things with old videos. And I really like how we can find ourselves if we get a little lost in those millions of videos.
