The world of the ordinary people and their extraordinary videos
‘I like to watch. I confess’ says Michael Strangelove, adjunct professor in the department of communication at the University of Ottawa, opening his book Watching YouTube by divulging his enjoyment of any kind of video on YouTube and other internet sites – laughing babies, home-made cartoons, dancing girls, clever student art projects, amateur documentaries, real-life actions.
Watching Youtube, as Strangelove positions, cannot capture all of the ‘Tube’ but rather offers a detailed survey of its broader social patterns and significances. Weaving a thread throughout the book, the first chapter offers a brief overview of the golden age of home movies, describing how online digital video is both similar to, and different from, traditional home movie making, and concludes the last chapter by arguing that we are moving into post-television era characterized by mass digital cultural production.
His analysis focuses on videos made by ordinary people, the ‘amateur videographers’ as the author calls them, who work outside the institutional structures of the television and movie industry providing an alternative to commercially driven content produced by professionals. Considering that ever since Adorno and Horkheimer (1947) denounced amateurs as irrelevant and meaningless, and that media theorists have had great difficulty reincorporating amateur culture into the centre of history, Strangelove’s aim to give such a significant role to amateur cultural production seems to be quite hard to achieve – at the beginning of the reading, at least. But he fully reaches his objective by developing a consistent study about the transformation of the audience (the main theme of the book), drawing a clear distinction between the active audience of mass media (as Ien Ang envisioned in Living Room Wars, 1996) and the contemporary hyperactive audience of online media.
Amateur online videography undermines the professionally-made, privately-owned and broadcast-based old media of the twentieth century. If the analogue audience was active as interpreter of meanings, the new digital audience has dual stance as producer and consumer of ‘video’ texts. Their videos capture aspects of everyday existence. They are adolescent (there is a trend among teenagers to post videos of themselves vomiting); sentimental (weddings); domestic (pets get millions of views); consciousness-raising (as the chapter ‘Women of the ‘Tube’ shows in relation to the subcultures of discussion and self-expression that YouTube inspires in every social minority), and are even Freudian if one considers the modes of self-construction that feature popular video diaries, also known as ‘video blogging’ or ‘vlogs’. The production and representation of reality in the new millennium is in the hands of amateurs. As a space that represents all activities of everyday life with all its differences and its conflicts, YouTube is a field where marginal voices are moving centre-stage and threaten the mainstream media’s influence. Having said this, Strangelove knows well that amateur cultural production is deeply entwined with commercial media and is co-opted by the marketplace, but also recognizes that ‘it does not have to submit to the imperatives of economic exchange. There is no state or corporal mechanism that can ensure that amateur cultural production will serve as propaganda for democracy or capitalism. As a meaning-production system, amateur online video is free from economic and ideological control mechanisms. It is free to produce resistance’. (p. 183)
As already said, Watching YouTube is a book about the audience, particularly in the final chapter where Strangelove presents features of this emerging ‘post-television audience’ discussing a key activity on Youtube: the technique of appropriation. Whereas the television audience can only interpret, the YouTube audience has now the privileged position of easily taking content, changing it and turning it into their own video creation – something sociologically significant that could be deemed the ‘democratization of moviemaking’. A well-known example of this occurred during the American presidential race of 2008, where various people took a clip from the 2004 German movie Downfall and inserted English-language subtitles into a scene where Hitler explodes in the face of defeat. The lines viciously parodied Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, John McCain, Sarah Palin and many others. This appropriation became so popular that it has even been mentioned in The New York Times.
Strangelove seems funny – his website opens with a brief video on how the internet is like a good cigar. But he takes the internet seriously and his analysis of it is well-written and extensively researched. He has no interest in playing the role of a new media prophet and approaches online amateur video as a digital ethnographer who deeply participates in the community being studied, actively using the media technology under investigation. The book is an intimate exploration of a global phenomenon of ‘Tube’s’ culture (emerging genres, interactions and communities). What impresses the most is the huge variety of videos the author explores, analyses and reports. Along with the famous videos such as ‘Charlie Bit My Finger’ there are many that are entirely new as examples that typify the social uses and significance of amateur online videography. The book is an extensive study supplemented by an online blog, and so, is ‘a must’ for scholars, professionals, students, online video makers and anyone else who wants to explore the significance of YouTube.
After reading Watching YouTube, follow Strangelove’ s advice: grab your video camera, turn on your cellular phone, launch your webcam, make a video and upload it to YouTube.
Tell us your story. We all like to watch!
Reviewed by Cecilia Guida
http://www.strangelove.com
http://www.strangelove.com/blog
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