YOUTUBE Digital Media and Society Series Chhatrasingh Kothari

History of Youtube!  Founded by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim  All early employees of PayPal

So the story goes…  Idea of Youtube developed due to difficulty sharing videos that were shot at a party at Chen’s apartment.  First Video made for Youtube ( XAC9IVRw). XAC9IVRw

YOUTUBE What makes it successful? FOUR KEY FEATURES 1.Video Recommendations via the ‘related videos’ list 2.An link to enable video sharing 3.Sharing comments (and other social networking functionality) 4.An embeddable video player (Burgess 02)

Discomfort of both Corporate and Community Interests  Multiple roles  Media archive  Broadcast platform\  Soacial network  Youtube’s value is not produced or even predominately by the top-down activities ….rather…produced by users en masse (05)

Making Sense of Youtube  Making sense of how it works  CATAGORIES  …large scale computer-assisted research also tends to rely on Youtube’s own catagorization and tagging systems, which enable uploaders to describe and sort their videos by content, theme, and style. (08) 

Research vs. Results  ….misuses of tags may well turn out to be more interesting than their ‘proper uses’ (08)

“Participatory Culture”  “…fans and consumers are ‘invited’ to create new content…”(12)  Bottom up…or….Top Down?

Consumption  “… no longer necessarily seen as the end point in an economic chain of production but as a dynamic site of innovation and growth in itself” (13).

Youtube Represents…  “….not so much the collision as the co- evolution and uneasy co-existance of ‘old’ and ‘new’ media industires, forms and practices”(14).

Chapter 2 – Youtube and Mainstream Media  Media Characteriztion vs. Threat to Media Dominance

Amateur Video  What is celeberity?  Who manufactures it?

Copyright Wars  Viacom Vs. Google!  be be 