- Stephen Weiswasser (of ABC) said “You aren’t going to turn passive consumers into active trollers on the Internet”, however since ABC started broadcasting in 1948, YouTube has produced more in the past 6 months without producers but with the help of normal people .i.e. anyone who has ever uploaded anything onto YouTube
- On YouTube, there are:-
* 9232 hours of uploaded videos posted on YouTube a day (which is the equivalent of 385 always on TV channels)
* 200,000 3 minute videos
- This video has been spread from people to people through the use of their computers, because on websites such as Del.icio.us people have tagged it and when it becomes tagged it becomes bookmarked enabling it to be watched by several more million people across the world, this is “user-generated organisation”
- It can also be known as “user-generated distribution”, if the video is tagged as “Web 2.0” on Del.icio.us it then goes back onto Del.icio.us under the “Web 2.0” list allowing it to be viewed by many other people who come across it
- Every spring there are 10 students who study the videos on YouTube, they watch a number of videos on YouTube on one side of the screen where they are then able to upload their own data based on what they view on the other side of the screen, all the data uploaded onto YouTube then goes into a database of which the students can analyse
12:56 - Who is on YouTube?
- In today’s society, people are most likely to think that YouTube is mostly viewed by teenagers because in 25% of the videos posted on YouTube there are mostly 12-17 year olds featured in them
- “Crank Dat Soulja Boy” by Soulja Boy has famously been recreated by people making videos of themselves doing the dance routine and making their own versions of the dance and song, for example:-
* Crank Dat Harry Potter
* Crank Dat Homeless Man
* Crank Dat Spongebob
- When women joined the work force there was less time for them to spend with their families and friends
- Moving from small grocery stores where probably the majority of communities would shop to big supermarkets has greatly contributed to the loss of community as people are no longer shopping together buy are now shopping apart
- Barry Wellman made a statement that networked individualism is actually “moving from place to place to person to person connectivity” showing that we are extremely networked (by the use of mobile phones, TV, Internet .etc.) but that we are also individualised
18:41 - Cultural Inversion: individualism and community
- The more individual we become the more we long for community because we all want to have that sense of individualism but we also long for stronger relationships with people
- Cultural Inversion is actually formed by what we view on YouTube. In 1995, Robert Putnam said “that meeting in an electronic forum is not the equivalent of meeting in a bowling alley”
19:15 - Understanding new forms of community through Participant Observation
- Michael Wesch had agreed with Robert Putnam’s statement when he and his students started participating in the community by uploading videos of their own
- He said to experience the phenomenon of Participant Observation you have to understand it
21:18 - YouTube as a medium for community
- Michael Wesch and his students went back to the idea that when media changes human relations change, an example of this is how they were able to build a community through the use of webcams
- A video was made by one of Wesch’s students showing that she is actually talking to her webcam and not the users of YouTube and that even though when someone views the video it may appear that she is talking to them but she doesn’t know who they are
23:00 - Our first vlogs
- People actually find it hard when they create their first vlogs because they do not know what to talk about or it could be viewed by the people watching them making their vlogs as being some what weird because it could easily come across as if they the are talking to themselves
25:00 - The webcam: Everybody is watching where nobody is (“context collapse”)
- When creating a vlog, it may feel like everyone is watching you but no one is actually there, because a vlog could be created in the most private of places like your bedroom but is broadcasted on the most public places like YouTube where millions of people will be able to view it
- When creating vlogs on YouTube, it is a great place for someone to reflect on themselves and for them to study their identity
- Wesch said that we actually get to know ourselves through the understanding of how others view us, he refers to the “Looking Glass Self” created by Charles Cooley where the three main components of it are:-
* We imagine how we must appear to others
* We imagine the judgment of that appearance
* We develop our self through the judgments of others
26:05 - Re-cognition and new forms of self-awareness (McLuhan)
- The vlog that you created may be viewed by you sometime later in your life where you will be able to re-assess your character by how others view you
- When creating vlogs, people often say that they don’t think of themselves as the way that they appear to others, when Marshall McLuhan talked about re-cognition and new forms of self-awareness, he said that all events recorded by a person are also being replayed and that it offers a means of re-cognition offering there to be a deeper level of awareness than it does the first time when it was created
27:58 - The Anonymity of Watching YouTube: Haters and Lovers
- The whole concept of the anonymity of YouTube is that it is anonymous allowing people to write any type of comments they want to whether they are positive or negative comments because no one will know who wrote them. This leads onto the idea that YouTube is about “Freedom to experience humanity without fear or anxiety” as stated by Wesch
- Through the view of YouTube videos, you are able to watch other people without staring at them, this is because you’re not actually watching them in front of you, you’re watching them over a screen and in those first few minutes of you watching them, your mind could already be made up about what you think of them
- People can become overwhelmed with what they view on YouTube, for example a person’s looks
- In reality, people are not able to experience others as human beings because it is not right to stare at people, however on YouTube they are able to do this because the other person obviously can’t see them
30:25 - Connection without Constraint
- YouTube offers us to connect with people over the Internet, it allows us to not feel the deep responsibilities of that connection where it does with meeting people face to face
- This proves the point that “media does not just distance us but it keeps us connected in a different way” allowing us to connect with people who we may never actually come face to face with
32:35 - Free Hugs: A hero for our mediated culture
- The Free Hugs campaign became a social movement when Juan Mann walked around Sydney, Australia with a sign saying “FREE HUGS”, a video of this was made where it was then uploaded onto YouTube where it has now received nearly 30 million views, it bought anonymous people together through the gesture of a free hug
- The campaign has now gone worldwide where people in different countries have filmed themselves doing it
34:02 - YouTube Drama: Striving for popularity
- If you want people to see your channel on YouTube, you have to be one of the most subscribed or most popular for your channel to be featured on the front page
- People are always competing to be one of the “stars” on YouTube so that they can be seen or rather their channel can be seen
34:55 - An early star: emokid21ohio
- He had set up vlogs on YouTube where a girl had viewed his first vlog and through YouTube they had began an “online love story” where thousands of people had tuned into watch
- LonelyGirl15 started vlogging in June 2006, many people questioned her authenticity stating that she was fake (like emokid21ohio) but LonelyGirl5 was actually a soap opera created by three writers
- The creators of LonelyGirl15 said that she is a reflection of everyone
- It later sparked a series of video posts where people questioned if YouTube is really authentic in the content of which is uploaded onto it
39:50 - Reflections on Authenticity
- Now that we are the producers of YouTube and are able to edit our own histories and play with our identities, people no longer know what is real and what is fake on YouTube
- People don’t trust YouTube
41:54 - Gaming the system/Exposing the system
- People often post videos that feature a porn thumbnail (even though it is fake) so that people will click on them enabling the videos to get more views
- Lisa Nova says that the “user generated members” of YouTube should have the right to have their videos get the attention they deserve rather than the obscene content people upload onto it
43:37 - Seriously Playful Participatory Media Culture
- You never know where a camera is and therefore never know when you’re going to be captured, this leads onto say that you never know if anything that features you is going to be uploaded onto YouTube
- Any remixing is illegal
47:32 - Networked Production: The Collab. MadV's “The Message” and the message of YouTube
- MadV became a platform for people to come together and collaborate, he said “make a simple statement on your hand and show it to the World”
- It goes back to the use of webcams
- It became the most responded to video on YouTube when people recorded themselves writing other simple statements on their hands
49:29 - Poem: The Little Glass Dot, The Eyes of the World
- The Little Glass Dot is Wesch’s poem; it talks about the webcam being the eyes to the World
- The webcam can be many things but it cannot just be one thing, it can be there for us to strive for fame or to just simply connect
- The Little Glass Dot is not what you make of it but what we make of it
51:15 - Conclusion by bnessel1973
- Some people believe that the videos on YouTube are created for the hopes to change the world, he made his to help him live in it
- YouTube brought him life again as it became a form of therapy for him and it allowed him to act how he wanted to feel
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