1. Timberlake/Biel are over but she’s not ready to accept it;

2. Nearly every book for sale here is a “#1 NYTimes Bestseller”, so much so the credential no longer has any value for me – it’s just a signifier indicating a book has been published by a major, popular press.

Turtle Beetle of Win

Today I discovered That Will Buff Out, a site filled with pictures of cars and vehicles in precarious or ridiculous situations. The site is part of the Cheezburger network (this week celebrating two years of popularizing image macros), which has expanded from a few sites, particularly ICHC and IHAH, to 20-odd sites collecting random Internet picture fun. Something about this expansion befuddles me, though it might just be the fact that they’re moving from some unique offerings (ICHC is by far the stand-out site, something of an innovation when it began, and still regularly fun) to a sort of copypasta franchise model that doesn’t seem to have the heart of the original space. Still, I could look at image macros of kittens all day, so I’m not going to rain on anyone’s parade.

Building on previous work that developed a wheelchair operable by thoughts, Ichikawa’s 50-centimeter robot is capable of walking, turning right, and stabbing things. Says the excited fourth-year student:

“As this is the first neural signal-controlled combat robot, I hope a lot of people will get to know about it,” said an excited Ichikawa.

Link via Neatorama via Popular Science

An interesting detail in these figures is the stratification of income among different types of users: the average income of passive spectators of user-generated content sites is significantly higher than the median income of content creators. In other words, the contingent of spectators and inactives, which is much larger than the 13 percent of actual creators, constitutes an appealing demographic to site owners and advertisers. The active participation and creation of digital content seems to be much less relevant than the crowds they attract: the homogenous term ‘users’ is misleading in that it conceals the difference between active and passive involvement or, put differently, between producers and consumers of user-generated content. Manifestos such as Wikinomics and ‘We-Think’ make one believe that, since every user is an active, creative contributor, the very idea of ‘consumer’ is definitely passé. The term ‘user’ turns out to be a catch-all phrase covering a wide range of behaviour, from merely clicking to blogging and uploading videos. Mass creativity, by and large, is consumptive behaviour by a different name.

– José Van Dijk and David Nieborg, 2009, ‘Wikinomics and its discontents: a critical analysis of Web 2.0 business manifestos’, New Media and Society, 11(5), 855-874.

A popular response to the recognition of this very fact is an attempt to develop continuums, spectrums, and ladders of participation. Such efforts have resulted in some good interrogation of what participation means in the contemporary moment. I can’t help but wonder, however, if a more fruitful path is to avoid trying to group everything under one label, no matter how nuanced, complex, or structured the models are. As Ien Ang wrote once, the challenge with the ratings industry is that it pushes forward a singular proposition of what it means to “watch” television. Even complex models of ‘users’ or ‘participation’ might replicate the same problem.

Should online video provdiers be compelled to preserve the material on their servers? YouTube’s dual status as a cultural archive and an online video business is fraught with tension. The viability of the content on the site regularly strains under copyright (Warner sent a DMCA request on a Lessig video?) and business pressures (YouTube to lose $500 mill.?).

During the Q&A after Jean Burgess’ presentation to the Information Society Project at Yale, Laura Denardis raised a question about whether the issues surrouding Google’s acquistion of what amounts to control over the copyright of orphan works through the Google Books agreement with the Author’s Guild might have an analog on a site like YouTube – what are the implications of posting video content where the ownership is unclear because of the age or right’s status of the footage? Especially as whiffs of anti-trust discussions start to rise from the decision itself.

Whilst I’m almost certain the number of works likely to be affected is nowhere near as high as in the case of the Google Books decision, I think this is an interesting question as it brings us back around to considering the public and cultural obligations of organizations like Google as they build co-created businesses. Despite the fact they may have become toothless over the years, television broadcasters have long been held to public service obligations in exchange for their use of public airwaves. While the spectrum scarcity issues are eradicated when we move online, and the infrastructure is maintained by for-profit companies, I think we might do well to consider the implications of not imposing some form of public service obligation on a company like YouTube.

I know there are some wicked clever archivists who have been grappling with these issues for a long time now. I should really go and read their thoughts. And you should too.

/quick thought.

Me at the Zoo (the first video uploaded to the service)

McNuggest Rap (McDonald’s commercial)

Hey… I heard you YouTube

The Day the YouTubes Died

YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture

New From Polity Press

The three presentations in this session discuss work in the forthcoming Polity title YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture (2009) by Joshua Green and Jean Burgess. In this timely and comprehensive introduction to how YouTube is being used and why it matters, Burgess and Green discuss the ways that it relates to wider transformations in culture, society and the economy. The book critically examines the public debates surrounding the site, demonstrating how it is central to struggles for authority and control in the new media environment. Drawing on a range of theoretical sources and empirical research, the authors discuss how YouTube is being used by the media industries, by audiences and amateur producers, and by particular communities of interest, and the ways in which these uses challenge existing ideas about cultural ‘production’ and ‘consumption’. Rich with both concrete examples and featuring specially commissioned chapters by Henry Jenkins and John Hartley, the book is essential reading for anyone interested in the contemporary and future implications of online media. It will be particularly valuable for students and scholars in media, communication and cultural studies.

Jean Burgess: YouTube: A Short History of Competing Futures

YouTube is arguably the first mass-popular platform for user-created media content. It launched without knowing exactly what it was for, and it is this under-determination that explains the scale and diversity of its uses today. Although its underlying architecture is provided by YouTube, Inc, YouTube as a site of participatory culture has been co-created by the corporate, professional, everyday and organisational users who upload content to the website, and the audiences who engage around that content. Each of these participants approaches YouTube with their own, frequently conflicting, purposes and aims; and they have collectively if not collaboratively shaped YouTube as a social network and a popular archive.  But at the same time, it is this openness, scale and diversity that are primarily responsible for the ongoing and escalating conflicts around the meanings, uses and possible futures of YouTube, as represented in recent controversies over corporate takeovers and copyright violations. This paper will discuss the relationship between YouTube’s underdetermined origins; the complexity and diversity of its contemporary uses; and the implications of its uncertain futures for participatory culture.

Joshua Green: Mapping YouTube’s Common Culture

Studying a dynamic cultural system like YouTube requires an approach that balances the range of participants and co-created media space. Determinations about what counts as content are difficult to make from the data alone, and require an examination of the videos. At scale, this poses a challenge to the methods of cultural and media studies. The methods of media and cultural studies are particularly adept at the close, richly contextualised analysis of the local and the specific, bringing this close analysis into dialogue with context, guided by and speaking back to cultural theory. But scale at the level which YouTube represents tests the limits of the explanatory power of even the best grounded or particularist accounts-among the millions of videos hosted at YouTube, it is relatively simple to find sufficient examples of whatever phenomenon the researcher wishes to investigate; it is much more difficult to use this approach to account for how YouTube itself works as a cultural system. Attempting to address the missing middle between large-scale quantitative analysis and the sensitivity of qualitative methods, the study discussed combined the close reading of media and cultural studies with a survey of 4,320 of the videos calculated to be ‘most popular’ on the website at a particular moment — gathered between August and November 2007. This paper discusses the research approach and attendant challenges, as well as opportunities for understanding dynamic co-created cultural systems.

Henry Jenkins: What Happened before YouTube?

News coverage has depicted YouTube as an unprecedented expansion of grassroots creativity. This presentation will argue, however, that YouTube intervenes in a much larger history of participatory culture, offering new mechanisms for promotion and circulation of amateur media. Youtube emerged from the utopian fantasies of early cyber-advocates and from the decisions made by a range of different subcultural communities and interest groups to seek a shared rather than localized platform for distributing their content.