A Billion Clips a Day

Whatever claims to revolutionary credibility the internet might have boasted in its early years were pretty much laid to rest by 2006. That’s when Time magazine, the staid burgher of a declining print journalism tradition, named “us” as the Person of the Year. The reason was the alleged shift in power afforded by interactive digital technologies, which had finally delivered all us little folk to a place where our voices had risen in pitch and volume above all others. Our Time had arrived.

YouTube, the online video exchange service that delivers an estimated billion clips per day to its global audience, was only a year old when Time made its Neville Chamberlainish gesture to the common folk who were turning their attention (by the millions) away from traditional forms of print media and information. And while the news magazine’s blessing could be interpreted as mainstream media’s attempt to co-opt and subsume a new, user-dominated mode of communication, in fact a revolution of sorts had definitely occurred. Perhaps it was not of the kind envisioned by Marx, Che or John Lennon, but a seismic upheaval nevertheless. The question was, and remains, what brave new world was this?

Michael Strangelove, the author of Watching YouTube: Extraordinary Videos by Ordinary People and an adjunct professor of communications at the University of Ottawa, is understandably wary of making any over-revolutionary claims for YouTube—which was bought by Google in 2008 and now enjoys partnerships with several giant media conglomerates—but he is convinced that something sociologically significant has taken place. And for a very simple reason: most of the people who use YouTube do so to watch and contribute homemade videos by ordinary people, which makes the service arguably the most pervasive medium for public dialogue since the rise of the democratic voting system.

But whoa. That is exactly the kind of world-shaking claim that has prematurely seduced and embarrassed scholarly media observers for decades (remember when the VCR machine was going to sideline movie theatres forever?). The stone cold fact of the matter is that technology tends not to overthrow societies so much as to modify them. Considered as a tool, technology is only transformative to the extent to which it is used and, thus far, the internet has been used by most regular people—the people whose images and voices are now disseminated to an unprecedented extent on YouTube—for amusement.

However, given the sheer extent of the amusement taken from YouTube, not to mention the vast array of forms the technology invites that amusement to take, the question is less about how the world has been changed by it than how it itself is changing. At the moment, YouTube is like the river that is different every time you step into it. The point is not to get too terribly carried away by its swirling currents.

As a delineator of what he clearly feels is a major upheaval in popular communications— not to mention a keen YouTube user and creator—Strangelove is thus both cautious and optimistic, keeping his palpable excitement over what is happening anchored to both a historical awareness of interactive YouTube’s antecedents—like home movies and analogue videotape—and a weighty methodological rigour.

The result makes for what you might call a book of tightly leashed fervour. Calling the tendency of premature scholarly calls-to-arms over digital media “the excesses of the past,” Strangelove is nevertheless pretty certain that YouTube, if observed from a properly empowering point of view, is shaking things up so they will never be put together in quite the same way again: “Media theory risks overlooking seismic shifts in the social landscape if it fails to identify truly new spaces of cultural production and consumption,” he writes. “We are on solid ground when we label mass participation in amateur video as a new mode of production and consumption. Amateur video provides an alternative to commercially driven content produced by professionals labouring within the entertainment and media industries.”

Within that staid phraseology—Strangelove does not tend to write amusingly of amusement— is the crux of this book’s claim to our attention. It is the simple fact of YouTube’s use by so many millions of amateurs—“producers,” in the author’s words—followed by the potential for “alternative” perspectives that that fact implies—that demands our serious regard. To put it crassly, when that many Munchkins get the chance to be heard, we’re definitely not in Kansas anymore.

YouTube is not a movement, and Strangelove is at times hard pressed even call it a community. But what is shaping up there, to the tune of billions of user-made, generated and traded home videos, is what may be the most spectacular manifestation so far of the digital technology-driven shift from what has been called the old read-only (RO) technology to the new read-write (RW) forms of media. In the older model, society was governed by forms of mass communication, which allowed for production to move in only one direction: from Them that made it to Us that watched (or read, or listened to) it. Forms of mass media were largely delivered via a unidirectional production-consumption axis, a form of one-sided exchange that divided the communications world into producers and consumers, performers and audience, powerful and powerless. It was this closed-system model of media influence that gave rise to the once widespread criticism of the media as the mass hypnotist of public wants and desires, a hypodermic anaesthetic fired directly into the heart of a supine, powerless and oblivious body politic.

If Strangelove seems to spend nearly as much time addressing the academic traditions of media theory as he does the mass-cultural redecorating prompted by YouTube, it is because there is more to this phenomenon than the billions of minutes of user-generated images that currently occupy so much of the content of the internet and the attention of its users: the very fact of this communications tsunami compels a complete rethink of so much media theory. Up until the internet came along to complicate matters, the history of top-down mass media influence had operated as a form of handily closed-system discourse in itself. From Marx to Marcuse, Vance Packard to Neil Postman, McLuhan to Chomsky and Naomi Wolf to Naomi Klein, the mass media was viewed as a sort of monolithic enforcer of unequal power relations, a manufacturer of consent that depended for its hegemony and influence on the very thing that a service like YouTube presumably brings to a screeching halt: controlling who gets to speak.

“So what happens to the social order,” Strangelove asks, “if tastes are no longer so closely controlled by institutionalized influences? Is the formation of taste among the online audience part of a post-modern shift in the nature of popular culture?” And what happens to all those professors who bought the old model?

For Strangelove, the possibility of this post-modern shift is evident in the simple fact that YouTube, which he tells us contains nearly 80 percent user-generated content, is a place where people go not just to watch but to participate. That these people come from countries around the world, cross cultural and socioeconomic borders, and are as likely to be women as men—and more likely to be young than old—represents the primary case to be made for the reconfiguring of the media landscape. YouTube has given voices to those members of society most likely to be presumed disenfranchised by the old model of mass media influence, and the growing cacophony of formerly marginalized perspectives has inaugurated an unforeseen dilution of the mainstream media by alternative influences.

Because it is an academic book, because it is reasonably cautious and because it is one of the first to attempt to grapple with YouTube’s extraordinary impact, Watching YouTube is also a limited reading experience. Obliged initially to make the case for the existence and legitimacy of the book—a case that really only needs to be made to those Luddites who are not already using YouTube—Strangelove is forced to remain at an often frustrating academic distance from his material. Numbers are cited endlessly as evidence of the network’s size, influence and ubiquity, and the discussion of the actual content of YouTube’s user-generated videos—testimonials, pop culture parodies, domestic spats, video blogs, funny pet spectacles—is more often cited than probed. As a result, what is missing from the book is exactly what I, as an old-media-model baby boomer, had hoped most to encounter: an insider’s perspective on the culture—vibrant or otherwise—of YouTube, a tour of its trenches hosted by a denizen and generously spiced with you-are-there specifics.

Instead, the thesis structure of the book demands that the case as stated be defended, restated, defended, restated and summarized, with the twofold result that 1) there is a lot of repeating of what was already said to reinforce what was already said and 2) theoretical generalities tend to take precedence over the specific analysis of particular videos.

Not that the case made is not fascinating, pertinent or substantial. Essentially, Strangelove is arguing that YouTube may be subject to contradiction (it is, after all, a corporate entity that hosts millions of individual contributions), prone to reactionary unpleasantness (there is a lot of hate and stupidity on display), rife with advertising and hustle and filled with untold hours of vapid triviality, but that this might be the price paid for a truly democratic public forum in the post-digital world. After citing, in separate chapters, the conspicuous presence on YouTube of several sectors of experience that do not conform to the traditional proclivities of old main-steam media—“The Home and Family on YouTube,” “Video Diaries: The Real You in YouTube,” “Women of the ’Tube,” etc.—Strangelove concludes with a measuredly optimistic case for the potentially radical horizon yet to be reached: “YouTube may provide us with a means to bring the everyday further into the arenas of political struggle. It may further subject the everyday to the logic of commodification. In all probability it will do both.”

And that may be the future, or at least all that can be said of it with any certainty. If anything, digital culture brings us more of everything: more voices, more advertising, more creativity, more stuff to buy, more communication, more ignorance, more information, more nonsense. By eroding certain conceptual barriers once thought unbreachable, it may be demonstrating nothing quite so forcefully as the possibility of a future with vigorously thriving contradictions. Once upon a time, in a time long before anyone could imagine YouTube, a musician called Gil Scott-Heron recorded a piece called “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.” Well, yes it will, and it has. With commercials.