Why do I like Youtube?

I

 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.