Learning the 5 Lessons of YouTube: After Trying to Teach There, I Don’t Believe the Hype

“DIY” is new media’s latest buzz-word1: ”prosumers” mashing up the Simpsons, Jessica or Bart; YouTubers uploading streams of lonely video. Bollocks! Let’s do pay mind to the buzz-cocks. DIY2 is nothing new. While web 2.0 may radically expand access and distribution of media to its erstwhile viewers, DIY was once punk, and it meant much more than friendly citizen-practitioner.

Wikipedia explains, “Common punk views include the DIY ethic, rejection of conformity, direct action for political change, and not selling out to mainstream interests for personal gain.” Punk was Rotten and Vicious. Sincere, or even Cynical contributions to the corporate machine do not a DIY ethics make.

1. 1. USC’s Institute for Multimedia Literacy recently held the conference 24/7: A DIY Media Summit: http://iml.usc.edu/diy/stream.
   
2. 2. http://www.youtube.com/user/BlankTV

I am a professor of Media Studies whose work has focused upon the activist media of non-conformists. In the fall of 2007, I decided to look more closely at YouTube. The banal videos I regularly saw there did not align with the ethics underpinning the revolutionary discourses I study, nor those heralding the new powers of on-line social networking.

So, I taught a course1, Learning from YouTube, about and also on2 the site3: all class sessions4 and coursework were posted as videos or comments and were open to the public.

One press release later, and we actually became the media relay we were attempting to understand.

Immediately networked, to be largely mocked through the predictable anti-intellectual stance used at least annually to report on events like the meetings of the MLA (a scholarly paper on melancholy? and Keanu Reeves!), my students and I will have the last laugh. We learned a great deal about how this site limits the truly revolutionary potential of the technology. These are our 5 lessons of YouTube.

1. 1. http://www.youtube.com/user/MediaPraxisme
2. 2. http://www.youtube.com/group/learningfromyoutube
3. 3. http://www.youtube.com/group/lfyt08
4. 4. http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=CEF02FE8D6FBF2D2

Lesson#1. YouTube is not democratic. Its architecture supports the popular. Critical and original expression is easily lost to or censored by its busy users who not only make YouTube’s content, but sift and rate it, all the while generating its business.

The word “democratic” (free and equal participation), like “DIY,” is oft repeated in celebration of the new possibilities enabled by web 2.0 technology. Certainly, more people than ever can get to and use tools that allow for the easy production, distribution, and networking of media. Cindy enjoys this new freedom. She shoots and uploads her daughter Sissy’s trip to American Girl. However, once there, Sissy’s poorly shot and unedited adventure in consumerism languishes unseen except by Gramps and maybe a few hundred pals, never to equal the movement, attention, or possibilities afforded to the hottest ripped clips of American Idol.

That which we already know and already like enjoys the special treatment offered to the “most viewed”: videos that are easily found, and always visible, whether you search for them or not.

Hey, the most viewed deserve such attention! These special videos, well, they look like television, featuring the faces, formats, and feelings we’re already familiar with, or at least aspiring to them.

As is true in High School, popularity1 gauges something. It lets the talented, if unoriginal and uncritical, rise to the top (think high-kicking blond-babes of the pom-squad).

Interchangeable and indistinguishable, entertaining but not threatening, popular YouTube videos speak to a middle-of-the-road sensibility in and about the forms of mainstream culture and media. Underliers are pushed into the weird cliques and hidden halls of high school—what I call NicheTube—where a video immediately falls off the radar, underserved and unobserved by YouTube’s systems of ranking. Yes it’s great to be doing your own weird thing for your wacky friends, but any one else who might be interested is sure never to join in, given YouTube’s size and poor search systems. 

While we can all personally attest whether popularity (or its reverse) worked for us in High School, I’ll suggest the obvious: it is not the best or most “democratic” way to run our culture’s most visited archive of moving images. As we learned through my students’ research project on race on YouTube, the most popular videos about black people reflect and reinforce the standard views of our society (about black hyper-sexuality, low-intelligence, and gonzo-violence), while only in NicheTube can you find videos that support black self-love or analysis.

Meanwhile, the most wacky (or ideological) outliers are quickly flagged, flamed, tamed, and absented from YouTube’s pages (my students’ video, mentioned above, “Blacks on YouTube Final,” has been flagged for ‘inappropriate content,’ which I deem to be their analysis and not the black booty they feature which itself is featured all over YouTube). The more controversial your ideas or methods the quicker your demise. Free and easy to get on, the mob-rule system by which you get pulled off YouTube is user-initiated but corporate-ruled. Democracies maintain protections for minority positions and ours has labor laws, too, that compensate workers for hours logged.

1. 1. http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=F8BEF365AB0EC176

2.YouTube functions best as postmodern television set facilitating theisolated, aimless viewing practices of individuals while expertlydelivering eyeballs to advertisers. YouTube’s corporate ownershiplimits the form and content of its videos further curtailing thedemocratic promises touted for web 2.0.

YouTube is an at-home or mobile, viewer-controlled delivery system of delectable media morsels. And it’s really good for wasting time. On our private postmodern TV of distraction, discrete bites of cinema are controlled by the discrete eye of each viewer, linked intuitively or through systems of popularity into an endless chain of immediate but forgettable gratification that can only be satisfied by another video. The best YouTube entertainment integrates and condenses three methods developed in earlier media.

Humor, spectacle, and self-referentiality are mined to create a new video form organized by plenitude, convenience, and speed. (But maybe this isn’t so new: TV ad, anyone?)

The signature YouTube video is easy to get, in both senses of the word: simple to understand—an idea reduced to an icon or gag—while also effortless to get to: one click! A visual or aural sensation (car crash, big booty, celebrity’s maw, signature beat, extreme talent), or an already recognizable bite of media serve as the best videos’ iconic center. Understandable in a heartbeat, knowable without thinking, this is media already encrusted with social meaning or feeling (leave Britney Spears alone!) YouTube videos are often about YouTube videos which are most often about popular culture. They steal, parody, mash, and re-work recognizable forms, hence maintaining standard styles and tastes, and making nothing new at all. And so, humor enters through parody, the play on an already recognizable form, or else slap-stick, a category of spectacle.

What then of the videos of millions of regular people speaking about their daily lives, and to each other, in talking-head close-ups (the vlog)? While in every way a statement against corporate media, humor (self-mocking, ironic), spectacle (of authenticity, pathos, or individuality), and self-referentiality (to the vernacular of YouTube) still combine in this signature YouTube form to create their unique entertainment value.

3. YouTube reifies distinctions between professional (or corporate) culture and that of amateurs (or citizens) even as it celebrates its signature form, the vlog, and the flattening of expertise.

There are two1 dominant forms of video on YouTube: the vlog, characterized by its poor quality and vox populi, and the corporate video, easily identifiable because it is all the vlog is not: high quality production values referring to corporate culture.

“Bad” videos are made by regular people, using low-end technology, paying little attention to form or aesthetics while attending to the daily life, feelings, and thoughts of the individual. Bad form marks the hand of an amateur and the space of the mundane while propelling their movement round the net, for this is also the mark of their veracity and authenticity. These videos are unedited, word or spectacle reliant, and accrue value through the suffering, talent, or humor of the individual. “Corporate” videos look good— like mainstream media—because they are made by professionals, are stolen from TV, or are re-cut movies. They express ideas about the products of mainstream culture, in the music-driven, quickly-edited, glossy, slogan-like vernacular of music videos, commercials, and comix. They consolidate ideas into icons; meaning is lost to feeling. Vlogs depend upon the intimate communication of the spoken word. Corporate videos are driven by strong images, sounds, and sentiments.

YouTube could be a radical development in media because the video production of real people holds half of the medium’s vernacular. However, by reifying the distinctions between the amateur and the professional, the personal and the social, in both form and content, YouTube currently maintains(not democratizes) operating distinctions about who seriously owns culture. YouTube is already thought of as a joke, a place for jokes, a place for regular people whose role and interests must also be a joke. A people’s forum but not a revolution, YouTube video manifests the deep hold of corporate culture on our psyches, re-establishing that we are most at home as consumers (even when we are producers).

1. 1. http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=26D7FBF38A39AA6E

4. In the name of opening channels of communication, YouTube forecloses community. The world’s largest archive of moving images is, and will stay, a mess. A searching eye creates the greatest revenue.

YouTube draws users by fueling a desire for self-expression and community1. While many come to the site to be seen and heard by others, to make friends, they are much better served by places like the real world or MySpace.

For, the very tools and structures for community-building which are hallmarks of web2.0— those which link, gather, index, search, version, allow participation, commenting, and networking—are studiously refused on the site, even as YouTube remains its poster-child. Why can’t you comment in real time? Why aren’t there bulletin boards? Why won’t the site allow you to post other things next to your videos?

YouTube doesn’t answer, so people go elsewhere for these (rudimentary) functions, dragging their favorite YouTube videos behind them to more hospitable climes (with YouTube’s permission: goodbye and good riddance, we don’t need your photos or friends here!) YouTube is a place to upload, store (and move off) videos. The very paucity of secondary functions underlines its primary purpose: moving its users’ eyeballs aimlessly and without direction, scheme, or map, across its unparalleled archive of moving images and associated advertisements.

Why is YouTube such a mess? Google owns it, and they categorize and find things for a living. Meanwhile on YouTube, videos are hard to find, easy to misname, and quick to lose. While its millions of users would be well attended by a good archivist or two, in its calculated failings YouTube signals that it is not a place to hunker down or hang out with others, not a place within which to seriously research or study, not a place for anything but wasting time on your own. Even the most moving of videos needs to be connected to something (other than another short video)—people, community, ideas, other videos to which it has a coherent link—if it is to create what community does best: action over distraction, knowledge instead of free-floating ideas, connection over the quick link.

1. 1. http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=6DD456AE77A8BC31

Lesson5. YouTube may be DIY but it just ain’t punk, that is, unless you hack it.

Unlike the punks of yore, in Learning from YouTube we burrowed within the corporate system, respecting its rules and limitations, all the while re-purposing its aims, and using its vernacular to engage in its analysis. We learned that it is hard to learn from YouTube. Its architecture and ownership undermine fundamentals of academic inquiry and higher education: depth of dialogue, capability to find and link data, ability to sustain intimate and committed community, and structures of order and discipline.

However, I hope that the great many class videos I’ve used to illustrate this article establish that on its pages we learned to model new forms of academic exchange based upon the concise summary of complex ideas expressed through words, sounds,and images and open to the public.

Obviously, neither YouTube nor Google cared. There’s ample room for NicheTube critiques in its unruly pages. Yet, while corporations dominate YouTube, and their directives organize decisions about its structure, applications, forms, and provenance, everyday DIY users do have a voice within its pages, as well as other pages, like those here, and we need to make our demands for a radical public technological culture clear. Just because corporations control nearly everything in our society doesn’t mean that they should, nor that they are the best suited to choose all that we need from new technology. It’s true: punk’s long dead, it’s the era of web 2.0, and so I prefer to rethink thelessons of Learning from YouTube as a series of successful hacks at one site that allowed us to better understand it, speak what we learned on its terrain, and in its own terms.