Jean Burgess: YouTube and Participatory Culture
by Lea Shaver | April 28, 2009 | news and ideas | Comments Off
By Matthew Maddox, 1L
Jean Burgess of Australia’s Queensland University of Technology visited Yale Law School to present at the ISP’s weekly speaker series.
Together with Joshua Green of MIT, she is editor of YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture. The book is due for release May 26, 2009; we were treated to a sneak preview of its findings.
Dr. Burgess’ presentation connected YouTube’s undetermined and chaotic character to its rise as the preeminent platform for participatory media. Having made itself available and suitable for a wide and relatively unrestricted range of uses, YouTube as a media institution has been co-created by the various institutions and individuals who have put it to use. Through YouTube’s openness and indeterminacy, Internet users have been offered an unprecedented opportunity for the sharing of cultural experience on a global scale.
Burgess and Green undertook an investigation of YouTube’s common culture–the set of norms and practices that have emerged on the young platform. Their investigation began with the site’s most popular, most viewed video content. Roughly half of the content Burgess and Green surveyed were what they classified as “user-generated”, while approximately 42% were classified as “traditional media” content.
The investigators found, however, that individual users were somewhat of a supermajority of the contributors (uploaders) of the site’s most popular content while traditional media institutions were a small minority of these contributors, suggesting that individual users contribute a substantial amount of the traditional media content. Burgess and Green’s investigation also showed that, while traditional video content was more often “favorited” by users than user-generated content, user-generated videos were more often discussed in text comments and response videos.
The most common type of user-generated content attracting discussion and other interactions on YouTube are video blogs, or “vlogs.” Vlogs are the nuclei of the YouTube community–the nodes in social network that has emerged on the platform. Vloggers participate in and facilitate spirited discussions, invite responses, and thereby draw outsiders into the community developing around them. In this way, YouTube’s vloggers have emerged as homegrown community leaders. The participatory and interactive nature of the culture thriving on YouTube, Dr. Burgess contends, reflects shifts in popular ideas about cultural citizenship, cultural literacy, and the public sphere.
Dr. Burgess challenged the law’s confused treatment of regular users of online content as the end of the consumption chain rather than the beginning of that chain. The view of YouTube as merely a distribution platform for video content is wholly inadequate. Many of the ways in which YouTube is actually being used pose a direct challenge to ideas about cultural production and consumption that currently dominate the law. For more detail, buy the book or read the related paper from QUT’s digital repository.
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