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John Drew is a video journalist and filmmaker who most recently co-directed the feature Border Stories and co-produced the multimedia website www.borderstories.org, which won last year’s Public Prize at the Every Human Has Rights Media Awards in Paris and was nominated as a finalist in the 2008 Online News Association’s Best in Video Journalism category. John is currently pursuing a masters degree in media studies at the New School in New York City.
The YouTube Assemblage: An emergent, banal and yet potent site of semi-conscious political and hegemonic contestation
During the month of November of 2009, more than 170 million U.S. internet users watched online video- nearly 31 billion videos in fact, of which 39% were viewed via YouTube.com . That is to say, more than 12 billion videos were watched on a single website in one month (94.3 videos per viewer) and Google, which paid $1.65 billion (in stock) for YouTube in 2006, is now trying to figure out how to monetize this situation.
YouTube represents nothing less than a socio-technological phenomenon that is now reshaping several industries- but what exactly has Google, arguably the world’s most successful company, purchased? Having launched and premiered its first video in February of 2005, YouTube now uploads twenty hours of video every minute and yet still hasn’t turned a profit. What does Google know about YouTube that we don’t?
Drawing from the work of Geert Lovink, Jodi Dean, Soenke Zehle, Ned Rossitier and Manuel DeLanda, this paper seeks to critically discuss the current socio-technical existence of YouTube and what this existence might spell for the future. More precisely, by considering Lovink and Dean’s respective analysis of network culture and blogging, I argue that the role of the camera and video technology within the world of YouTube necessitates nuanced consideration that both complicates and amplifies each of their conclusions about the social and the directions it is shifting. I then argue that it is only with an understanding of DeLanda’s assemblage theory that we may adequately assess YouTube’s socio-technical existence and consider how it is uniquely implicated in various, albeit transient, social and political arenas. Finally, by incorporating Zehle and Rossitier’s discussion of non-representational politics, I argue that YouTube is in fact its own assemblage that boasts great political power, which is already destabilizing and deterritorializing traditional sources of capitalist domination, such as copyright law.
Lisa Lipscomb is a Sociology PhD student at The New School for Social Research in New York City. She holds an MA in Media Studies from The New School and a BA in English Literature from Western Illinois University. Her general interests include media, visual culture, gender and sexuality, and critical theory. Prior to returning to graduate school, Lipscomb worked in magazine publishing and film/video post-production.
Digital Events: Media Rituals in the Electronic Age
This essay looks at how a single event, the death of Neda Agha-Soltan on the streets of Tehran, Iran during post-election protests, became visible in the United States by way of digital media. The role of digital media will be scrutinized, as the event was captured using, most likely, a cellphone and distributed on the Internet through Facebook and YouTube. This essay clarifies how an event that unfolded on the streets of Iran came to be known across the world and how the United States came to a “definition of the situation” informed by and through digital media. An analysis of the American reaction/response to the “Neda death video” shows that a new type of event is taking place in the public sphere, and subsequently ritualized in the digital sphere.
Katie McGowan is a third-wave feminist, public radio advocate, media creator, and DIY craft enthusiast. She has spent four years with the Peabody award winning non-profit radio project StoryCorps, whose mission is to provide Americans of all backgrounds and beliefs with the opportunity to record, share, and preserve the stories of our lives. In 2009, she facilitated the launch of StoryCorps’ 2nd annual National Day of Listening campaign, which asked everyone to spend the day after Thanksgiving recording and sharing our loved ones stories. In her free time, she builds databases, websites and most recently, YouTube instructional burlesque videos for the New York School of Burlesque. Her undergraduate degree is from Smith College and she is currently a candidate for a Masters degree in Media Studies at the New School. She hopes to continue advocating for progressive arts and new media communities throughout her professional career, bringing tools for grassroots media creation to a wide public audience.
“Leave Britney Alone!” Online Queer & Transgender Vlog Communities and the Commercial Implications of YouTube’s “Don’t Be Evil” Policies
This paper examines the current scholarship on virtual blog communities, most recently video bloggers (vlogs) where transgender communities and sexual identities are forming or making a presence on forums like YouTube. This paper examines the implications of creating a global transgender online vlogger community and the implications with which YouTube selectively includes or excludes these voices as part of their paying preferred partner program. The paper argues that while there are benefits among the transgender vlog community towards gender, sexual, and identity expression online, the commercial incentives provided by YouTube to create and promote content is within a normative and constrained view of sexual identity & expressions and therefore financially incentivize certain expressions and sexual behaviors over others. The paper borrows from critical feminist, media, and literature theories to attempt to understand a new media platform with little scholarship.