YouTube Culture

(This is a big one, it turns out. Writing it kind of took over my whole morning. Oh well.)
Last week, Cal and I spent a little while plugging random search terms into YouTube and looking at what came up. As we watched random videos, it became obvious to me that there is a genuine cultural shift well underway right under our electronic noses.
Of the various videos we watched, three stand out in memory.
First was the YouTube Community Choir singing ’12 Days of Christmas’. In this, a large number of YouTube contributors, with their screennames captioned in, are edited together singing the complete 12 Days song. It’s all quite random, with some very ordinary enthusiastic folk singing their hearts out.
Second was a karaoke clip – a couple of teenage girls, apparently in their basement, leaping about lipsynching a song for the camera while taking the piss out of the song and themselves at the same time, and collapsing laughing several times.
Third was most interesting. It was a static camera shot of a room full of teenagers – obviously held by someone sitting in the corner. It just showed the group hanging out, awkwardly talking. That was the whole thing, for about four minutes, just teenagers standing around a room. It wasn’t engaging, and there was nothing in it that could possibly appeal to anyone outside the group of friends concerned. They had just recorded a bit of their lives and for some reason released it on YouTube.
I started chewing over what this might mean in the back of my mind. Then, a few days after, two other things happened:
Time Magazine’s Person of the Year was announced to be “You”.

We’re looking at an explosion of productivity and innovation, and it’s just getting started, as millions of minds that would otherwise have drowned in obscurity get backhauled into the global intellectual economy.
Who are these people? Seriously, who actually sits down after a long day at work and says, I’m not going to watch Lost tonight. I’m going to turn on my computer and make a movie starring my pet iguana? I’m going to mash up 50 Cent’s vocals with Queen’s instrumentals? I’m going to blog about my state of mind or the state of the nation or the steak-frites at the new bistro down the street? Who has that time and that energy and that passion?
The answer is, you do. And for seizing the reins of the global media, for founding and framing the new digital democracy, for working for nothing and beating the pros at their own game, TIME’s Person of the Year for 2006 is you.

Meanwhile, Making Light posted about Deaf culture finding expression via YouTube:

Why did it not occur to me that the signing deaf would be using YouTube as a public forum? This is transformational. Many of them aren’t comfortably fluent in written language. For many more, sign is and always will be their first language. YouTube gives them an easy, expressive, unmediated channel for many-to-many communication.

All of this lined up in my head, and it points at something big that is afoot.
YouTube is the most potent example of the rapid shift in our society from the old structure of mediated content delivered from a narrow source to a broad audience, to a new structure of (relatively) unmediated content delivered from a broad source to an (initially) narrow audience. (Those paranthetical clauses are in there because of how content is propagated online. It is impossible to reach a broad audience directly over the net, but if your narrow audience is impressed, they will spread awareness of the content far and wide. The viral effect will kick in and the audience can grow exponentially; this process serves as a form of mediation as well.)
Aside: There is no shortage of predictions that YouTube will collapse, or its culture will die due to increased commercialisation. There’s a good chance these predictions are right. But the phenomenon YouTube has channelled isn’t going anywhere. If YouTube falls, other venues will step into the gap without a second thought. There’s a bunch which are eager for a shot at YouTube-style prominence, and the mighty can fall fast online – where the hell is Friendster now, for example? (Answer: on MySpace like everyone else.)
YouTube is potent because it deals in audio-visual content. The moving picture is the holy vessel of our world; it is by far the most powerful form of media, being the closest we can manage to recording and sharing direct experience. Video gets us.
But video is also, historically, a huge pain in the backside. Recording has always been tricky, editing has been an absolute nightmare, and displaying it never less than problematic. In all three areas, technology has changed the rules massively. The digital video era is well and truly with us, with standard cellphone models carrying built-in video cameras; digital editing on your home computer has finally come of age as data storage and data handling limitations get overcome; and with YouTube the third, crucial piece of the puzzle has arrived, providing a forum for displaying and distributing your home video. Not only that, but it makes the whole thing so damn easy, and “The easier it gets to use, the less geeky the Net becomes, and the more it starts to look like real life.” (Cue bog-standard morgue rant about usability online and in the real world.)
This has all happened quickly. The implications are only just beginning to be felt.
YouTube isn’t even meant to be about original content. Probably its greatest value is as the world’s greatest repository of clips; an amazing range of video history is available if you dig around, from old Sesame Street clips to Mikhail Baryshnikov performing in Giselle in 1977. But what is important about YouTube, as opposed to what is valuable about it, is not its role as archive but its role as global video noticeboard.
As always happens, the new world is being explored and created by teenagers. A friend said the other day that she believes you can put any word you like into the YouTube search engine and find a fourteen-year-old girl lip-synching a pop song. Slate wrote about the rise of lip-synching via YouTube and lauded lip-synching as a distinctive folk art. There’s something going on there that is quite profound – this is the kind of thing that was once restricted to sleepover parties and now it’s recorded and put online. Why? What audience is being sought? Is this an attempt to communicate to your direct peer group, or to reach for the random fame of being seen by anyone anywhere? Is the audience even a factor at all? I could make some guesses (mostly, that it’s a mixture of all of the above) but all I know for sure is there is an entire channel of cultural engagement that simply didn’t exist in my youth.
There’s other kinds of artistry easily found, in large part driven by what music-maker/intellectual Paul Miller (DJ Spooky) calls ‘remix culture’. An amusing local news spot is remixed into a dance track; a trailer for Mary Poppins is remixed to look like a horror movie; a teenager’s self-recorded humiliation is made to look awesome.
The flip side of ‘remix culture’ is deconstruction; YouTube finally gives a platform to respond to the sophisticated message manipulation practiced in broadcast video. (For example, ‘Liberal Viewer’ spends four minutes exposing fifteen seconds of Fox News editing chicanery)
More artistry can be found in entertainment content created specifically for the medium – the lipsynching fourteen-year-olds fall into this category – such as the infamous LonelyGirl15 ‘Breeniverse’, the Chad Vader series, and sketch comedy weirdness by (TIME-profiled) Smosh.
Related to this is video-blogging, which is essentially people talking about their lives on video and posting it. It’s a different kind of thing to entertainment content, although clearly similar. TIME’s profile of a video blogger references the same William Gibson quote as Making Light: This isn’t what YouTube was designed for—to be the public video diary of a generation of teens and twentysomethings. But sometimes the best inventions are the ones people find their own uses for. “You have people from all walks of life wanting to share a piece of their life with you,” Leila says. “The feeling of togetherness is unbeatable. It’s a beautiful thing.”
There’s also a kind of artistry in the way we harness video distribution for other conversations. The tirade by Michael Richards would have sunk fast if the video hadn’t flipped on to YouTube and been spread all over. (Ed Driscoll: “in an era of demassified individual publishing, the safety net that the liberal mass media provided its favorite sons no longer exists.”) U.S. Republican Senator George Allen’s racial slur of a student following him on campaign helped wreck his campaign. (LA Times: “The impact of this instantaneous access has been earthshaking.”)
There’s some sharp thinking going on about this. Berkeley’s ‘Digital Youth Research’ features the research outline The Semiotics of Video Production, Exchange, and Reception on YouTube and Among Video Bloggers:

The project is interested not only in examining what particular technical tools children and youth learn to manipulate, but more importantly, how they learn to participate and find social acceptance in particular technical communities by creating videos. The researcher will investigate how video production plays a role in shaping young people’s values, beliefs, and goals with respect to learning about technology and learning how to behave in techno-social environments.

I don’t have any snappy conclusion other than ‘keep watching the skies’. This is big and new, and it is happening fast. This isn’t about what your kids will be doing in a decade – your kids are already doing this now. The world has already changed. Get ready to shift your balance.