The YouTube Reader

Bought for my dissertation research on social media. Turns out to be a very interesting book. The book is essentially a MASSIVE collection of articles on various subjects and aspects of YouTube and its culture. I will only focus on a few here.

Bibliographic Deets
Snickers, Pelle and Vonderau, Patrick (eds.) The YouTube Reader. National Library of Sweden. Stockholm. 2009.

Overview
As the editors explain in their introduction:

"YouTube has become the very epitome of digital culture not only by promising endless opportunities for viral marketing or format development, but also by allowing 'you' to post a video which might incidentally change the course of history. Establishing a clip culture that outpaces cinema and television, the brand-named video-distribution platform holds the broadest repository of moving-image culture to date" (11)

Furthermore

"The peculiarity of YouTube, then, lies in the way the platform has been negotiating and navigation between community and commerce. If YouTube is anything, it is both industry and user driven." (11)

YouTube is


 * Platform
 * Library
 * Archive
 * Lab
 * Medium


 * Media History -> Transitional moment in culture


 * Databases ("We watch databases" Geert Lovink)


 * Delineating New Media Practice (watching, making, sharing, engaging, etc. -> compared to Hitchcock's intervention in Cinema)

-- All this is on page 13 (13) --

Home Dance: Mediacy and Aesthetics of the Self on YouTube

 * Kathrin Peters and Andrea Seier (187)

"By introducing a gap between between the self and world, media enable a distance required for any relation to the self. Various technical apparatuses- from the quill to the webcam- place the self at a distance and at the same time bridge that distance to the extent that they make it accessible and accessible for alteration" (187)

Sports on YouTube

 * Markus Stauff (236 - 251)

"Sports, no doubt, contributed to formal and technical innovations and also to a kind of (self-)reflection of the media." (238)

"modern sports is constituted partly by the communication about and especially the comparison of performances, the visibility of the performance and the possibility of attributing the results to isolated components are of special importance" (240)

"Two significant features of YouTube are of special interest here: first, its highly intermedial and remedial character, and second, its principles of relation and comparing different items" (241)

Navigating YouTube: Constituting a Hybrid Information Management System

 * Frank Kessler and Mirko Tobias Schafer (275 -291)

All about the technicalities of the archive

Economics of Sharing Platforms: What's Wrong with the Cultural Industries

 * Joelle Farchy (360 - 371)


 * VERY RELEVANT TO On Instagram

"From a technical point of view, Web 2.0 is based on technologies aimed at making the internet truly interactive (RSS, Wiki, Flash). From a sociological standpoint, Web 2.01 involves the distribution or exchange of information and content submitted by Internet users themselves. Once a simple 'visitor' pr 'consumer' of information, the Internet user is more and more becoming a veritable contributor. From an economic standpoint, Web 2.0 is toppling a distributor model and replacing it with one descended from the network economy, based not on control of access via intellectual property rights, but the abundance of resources available and the growth in the number of users" (360)

Further
Purchased for research At Cambridge with an eye towards On Instagram