Elizabeth LePage
Sociology 022 – In the Facebook Age – Spring 2010 – Dhiraj Murthy

Liza LePage

4/26/10

Professor Murthy

YouTube’s Cultural Implications

            Since its birth on February 5, 2009, YouTube, a simple user generated site which allows users to post, watch and comment on videos, has become entrenched in today’s society and culture. YouTube hosts over one million views a day and in merely 60 days it releases more video content than all 3 major US networks have created in 60 years. (2010 Sundance 1). To date YouTube is the 3^rd most popular site in American behind Yahoo and Google taking a huge part in the new structure of the Information Society. YouTube is the eyes and ears of our society and gives people all around the world voices and outlets that were never available otherwise.  YouTube has a severe hold on the social norms of our time, but the real question rests on the normative value of the website. Like any new revolutionary addition to society, YouTube contains benefits but also hazards on modern day life. This paper aims to aims to explore the cultural implications YouTube has and the way it has shaped society at large.

At its core, YouTube is a highly democratic institution; it’s a truly public yet pervasive forum. By giving people the power to ‘broadcast themselves’ citizens gain control over the media instead of large broadcasting institutions and governments As Jenkins highlighted in his case study on YouTube, the site is only the representation of a broader societal switch to, ‘today’s participatory culture but it does not represent its origin point for any cultural practices people associate with it” (2009 Jenkins 110). The participatory culture began before the dawn of YouTube as citizens began to create their own the media of their own milieu because technology became more user-friendly and accessible. YouTube is revolutionary and democratic because it acts as a platform for all of various genres of amateur media to interact with each other and be heard.

This interaction and support has expedited the participatory culture because YouTube has popularized the sharing of videos by giving it a center and user friendly medium. The real beauty of YouTube rests in the people’s consumption and enthusiasm of the decentralized, user generated media. However by grouping together all of the different participatory niches, it has added new audiences to people’s personal media. Since the participatory culture no longer exists in same niches, many videos are stripped away from their original context and can be easily misinterpreted. For example a fan video put out by Nine Inch Nails listeners was leaked on to YouTube and their message was misinterpreted. The video was supposed to be a serious and distributing montage of sexual violence by Star Trek characters, mirroring the intense meaning of the song. Yet when it went on YouTube, the clip reached outside the Nine Inch Nail fandom to random people who saw the montage as comedic because it appeared to be portraying gay Star Trek love. Once the video went on YouTube it transcended beyond, “the interpretive context fandom provided” (2009 Jenkins 117), which for them made their art meaningless and degraded. Although YouTube allows citizens to post their own productions to the World Wide Web, sometimes there voice can be misinterpreted because of the lack of structure that YouTube provides. This ambiguity casts detrimental effects on civil society because people’s voices are not actually being heard in a legitimate way.

Keen in his anti-web 2.0 book, The Cult of the Amateur, bashes the rise of the participatory culture because it causes serious threats to the integrity of our society. He noticed that sites and institutions like YouTube are almost solely formed around people promoting themselves and showing mindless activities. As these programs become more entrenched in our society people stop using the power of the internet to seek out, “news, information, we use it to actually BE the news, the information, the culture” (2007 Keen 7). Keen sees this as dangerous because our focus has shifted away from the important world events such as elections and wars to trivial media and personal broadcasts. There are so many voices to be heard, so many truths and varying opinions that we are,” distorting, if not outrightly corrupting our national civic conversation” (2007 Keen 27).  The popularity of YouTube videos has little to do with the actual content or legitimacy of the source, but primarily rests in the user’s skill of internet advertisement and broadcasting.  The videos that make the “Most Popular” list do not reflect public  opinion, instead they are mindless clips of humor and entertainment, clogging our public discourse with unproductive, yet bonding threads.

YouTube is a public space, where nearly all ideas can be broadcasted and shared with the world. However it is not a public sphere where productive consensuses have the ability to be formed. YouTube, in all its popularity has transformed popular media for the worst. In essence it has ruined the backdrop for civic discourse by directing people to an overload of personal opinion and broadcast. As a means of entertainment, YouTube allows people to control what they watch in the most direct way possible. Yet as a means of cultural productivity, YouTube is too highly user generated and does not allow voices to be heard properly and for important news to be discussed in a legitimate productive forum.  Since there is no merit or aristocracy on YouTube, the site equates equal importance on personal and global events which decentralized and cripples our civic society.

Works Cited

“General YouTube Stats (Sundance 2010).” Pressatgoogle.com. Web. 04 May 2010. <http://sites.pressatgoogle.com/sundance2010/general-youtube-stats>.

Jenkins, Henry. “What Happened Before YouTube.” 2009. YouTube : Online Video and Participatory Culture. Cambridge: Polity. 109-25. Print.

Keen, Andrew. The Cult of the Amateur. New York: DoubleDay, 2007. Print.

YouTube has only been around for three years, but it has been ingrained in our society in incredible ways.  Henry Jenkins in his article “What Happened Before YouTube” makes the argument that YouTube, “may represent the epicenter of today’s participatory culture but it doesn’t represent its origin point for any of the cultural practices people associate with it.” People today see YouTube as the beginning of self broadcasting and a revolution of self made celebs. It has shifted the hub of entertainment out of the hands of the elite and into the hands of the people. Jenkins saw this phenomenon happen before YouTube with different enclaves like garage cinema, zines, and people’s radio, but YouTube is revolutionary because it gave the culture and home and a place to expand. Also with the lack of central control, one sees more free interaction take place on the site. Jenkins argues that the most critical part of the participatory culture is that it, ” creates strong social incentives to produce and share what one produces with others”. This exchange is what has effected our culture the most to date. On YouTube on sees an immense amount of communication and support through comments and discussion around videos.

YouTube in itself is a very democratic tool because it allows anyone to post and communicate with others, but the real question that Jenkins and also Keen looked at was does YouTube make society more democratic and does society make YouTube less democratic. In essence they both agreed that even though YouTube allows the free flow of ideas to be passed around without much restriction, it doesn’t really created a public sphere because there are so many different enclaves in the site and there is a definite focus on certain demographics. This makes sense because not everyone was the ability to participate in the same ways on YouTube because of their varying access to technologies. So Jenkins says that the new culture, “is not necessarily a diverse culture” which I agree with. Also the public sphere is tainted because people come on YouTube for very different uses and this often results in a misinterpratation of people’s clips.

 Keen has very negative reactions to YouTube because he thinks it is soiling our culture. He sees YouTube and a lot of other Web 2.0 software as generation attention towards useless information. The ‘wisdom’ of the crowd has sent our society into a confused and unproductive path. If one just looks at the most popular videos on YouTube at the moment (http://www.youtube.com/videos?s=pop) its hard to disagree with Keen’s logic. Yet later on in his book he tells his audience even though YouTube and other web 2.0 have been soiling our  social culture, he  is pleased to see minimal changes our governmental system because of YouTube. Thus our culture hasn’t really become more democratic because the same voices are being heard, now they just have to be a little bit louder to compete with everyone else.

The issue of the week involves the idea of democracy of the internet. The real question centers around if the internet creates greater democracy or does it merely mirror the already existing social norms. Laura Dahlberg and Zizi Papcharissi both explored this idea and came down with similar conclusions. They agreed that the internet as a unit can be seen as a novel vehicle for increased democracy because it allows millions of people from around the world to interact and share information. It is a vehicle where the power of the people can be heard and distributed. Sadly the internet has been transformed from its original state through the workings of global capitalism and currently  mirrors and magnifies the inequalities and  macro social interactions that were in place prior.

 Dahlberg highlighted the inequalities of the internet that we have previously talked about in class such as language barriers, poorer communities inability to access online networks and an intimidatingly strong white male majority controlling the pace and innovations of the web. These factors all contribute to divides in the internet interaction and usage which does not foster democracy; it gives the same people power who are already succeeding in offline life . Dahlberg’s main argument however is that the internet by itself has inherently democratic traits, but as soon as privatization occurred, these roots began to crumble while the commercializing capitalist market spread to the. Some argue that capitalism is very democratic because it operates on supply and demand which gets consumers what they want, but some believe that it is the market that control the discourse of the individuals. I tend to agree with the latter opinions because like Dahlberg I see that when privatization occurs, the internet becomes more and more of a money making machine and although individual needs and wants are heard, internet users become, ‘consumers rather than freely interacting citizens’ (76). The switch to privatization of the internet shifted the focus on interaction to consumption and that is what is hindering the true spread of global democracy on the web because the people in charge are the already rich and privileged peoples of the world and are not trying to change the status-quo.

Papacharissi explained that the internet is merely a public space, not a public sphere which means that even though discussion is held on the internet, these discussions are not forums for political deliberation. He lists three main constraints on the democracy of the web. One relates back to Dahlberg’s interpretation of the web because they both see the rise of privatization as the capitalist’s influence over the web, thus weakening the true democratic power of the web to mirror existing norms which are direct toward consumption and profit and not to social welfare and inclusion. Also Papacharissi thinks that the internet has formed so many different enclaves that the open discussion across different groups is not more frequent than in regular society. Also he highlights the access to information on the internet that poorer citizens face so the democratic powers of the web are not available to them.

So to sum it up, the internet could be an amazingly democratic tool, but the capitalistic soceity has already shaped it in such a way that it mediates commerence and like social group communication, but has no real impact to the larger picture of global voice and power.

It took me awhile to get in the swing of tweeting my everyday events and thoughts.  Keeping up a Twitter account felt unnatural and forced for me. I wasn’t used to throwing my thoughts down on such a public forum and I would sub-consiusly filter through my thoughts and daily activities to find something ‘tweet’ worthy. I wanted to post something interesting, but I also didn’t want to post anything too personal because I knew everyone in the class could read it. I felt like I couldn’t tweet about other people without their consent and was very wary to to insult anyone because these tweets became permanent structures to our blog and the Internet as a whole. Thinking back to the ‘google’ yourself exercise, it was clear that any of my comment could be seen by anyone who looked me up, or someone that I was following. I felt very under watch so my tweets were kind of safe and not really very telling. Also I found it a little annoying when I would have something really good to tweet about, but either wouldn’t have my touch on me or wouldn’t have any internet access.

Even though I wasn’t a pro-twitter it was to have a constant stream of tweets to look at and interact with on the touches. It actually did make me feel closer to the people in class by knowing their constant status updates when I was not with them. It was also really interesting to talk to people outside the class and their twitter or lack their of experiences as I was desperately trying to come up with things to tweet about. Most people outside the class I talked to that used twitter had an iPhone and rarely actually updated their status, but after I started following them, I saw that they did comment once and I while, but it seemed very random and not a daily regulated thing they mostly were replying to other tweets.

 Some one also showed me a twitter-like app that is apparently catching on. It is called foursquare and its like twitter how you follow people, but the updates  are GPS updates that are located all around cities. You can  even add locations if they do not show up on the app. The goal is to allow friends to update each other on their location, but also help each other find new places to go by giving back detailed feedback with the GPS update. My friends who use it thinks it is really fun and easy to use. This would be a much more simple way for me to update my friends on my status, but also I would enjoy hearing about new places from my peers

Surveillance is an issue that is very prevalent in today’s society. Most people are concerned about the threats the Internet has on their personal information. Though it is true that the amount of information available on the Internet is vast enough to gather vital data on virtually anyone who uses its services, the trade-off that one gains from the use of the Internet, tends to outweigh its potential threats.

Jones and Soltern through a groundbreaking case study of Facebook usage among 4 different colleges populations found that although each community used the network in different way, participation and shared information increased over time. So when the group became more comfortable with the site and began using it more, their tolerance and reservations about sharing personal information grew. As discussed in previous literature of social networking sites the more information one gives to the network, the more one becomes a part of the network and in turn the more one receives. Jones and Soltern noticed the increased ubiquity of each colleges facebook use for having and continuously updating ones profile; it has become ingrained in the social make-up of our time. In terms of social networking sites like Facebook, once the service gets utilized and shaped by its peers, norms become attached and usage patterns result that can transform what was once thought to be socially risky before hand, Increased usage usually results in increased trust. The students understood the privacy options on Facebook, but didn’t really care to use them to its fullest because they were fairly comfortable with the information available about them on the web.  They are part of the information society and it has become a norm to have a certain amount of data on you present in the Internet, if you don’t its almost like you don’t exist.

Foucault who wrote primarily about the relationship between power and knowledge in the late 70s gives interesting background to the potential benefits of surveillance. He writes before the real dawn of the Internet, but his research on the transformation of society after with the advent of panopticism and the carceral network gives some good theoretical background to the importance of the omniscient rule and order that the internet bestows. He basically states that under this new system of suspected constant surveillance used by jails, society became more self aware and that each man, “becomes the principle of his own subjection’. The rules and norms of the society become propagated by the judicial and punishment systems put in place by the jails.  Although the social norms were already present in these society, the new system naturalizes the legal power to punish as it legalizes the ways in which the institution is allowed to discipline. This transforms the norms and expectations of society into a function of rules that the population more or less does not contest.

The power of the government or overseer of society in this scheme is what really frightens me. As Foucault explains through the literal Panoptian figure iseveryday people could have the option of overlooking the government and seeing their society from the all-revealing view at the center which brings accountability on not just the people, but the rulers too. Although I think the idea of surveillance does bring about a kind of accountability which is integral to functions of society, the extent of information available on the web in a way blurs the control of information and interactions and disperses them around parts of society that make people feel less secure and more vulnerable. Some people, who have no higher authority or responsiblity to a society have been have to infiltrate the online community through hacking, credit card theft or just plan stalking. I see this as a deviant to the carceral model because even though information of everyone’s actions is in some way available to the public, only a few people have the time and the wherewithal to actual have the ability to use this information.

Livingstone’s piece in New Media and Society about teenager’s use of online social networks pertained to my online experiences but also  touched on aspects of these programs that I have never thought about. She based her paper around a bundle of interviews with London teenagers of varying ages, genders and class to find out their habits, thoughts, and motives while on social networking sites like Facebook and Myspace. What she found was that there was a clear difference in the motive and actions of the young teens vs. the old teens. The young teens used the sites as forum for self expression through crazy intricate web designs filled with music and color. The older teens, who were more drawn to Facebook than MySpace because of its more simplistic  were more concern with show casing their identity through the public interactions among their peers through pictures and messaging.

Livingstone saw the switch from MySpace to Facebook as necessary move because as soon as your peers start moving on to a new system, the old system could still represent you, but it becomes “embedded in a network of peer connections away from which (one) felt  (they) had moved” (402).  I have always seen the move from MySpace to Facebook as sort of a right of passage that teens undergo as they are ready to enter high school. Of course there are some scoundrels that sneak on Facebook before they enter high school, but the site really starts functioning when you join your high schools network and it becomes a even bigger deal when you can join your college’s network. In my mind, older people enjoy the set networks that are available on Facebook because they have reached an age where they are balancing a more rigorous and intentional social calendar. They are not using the site to find to new friend, but they are trying to use the site to connect, stalk or keep in contact with people they have met or heard about in thier offline lives. Facebook allows them to check up upon the connections that they have made in an easy, quick manner.

 I use my Facebook much like Ellie, by juggling many different random groups of friends: close friends, friends from home, friends I met on trips and programs, my friends’ new boyfriend, my brother’s friends, Bowdoin friends, etc. I don’t use personalized privacy settings for my different groups of friends even though I feel a different sort of intimacy among them. The only instance I prioritize real friendships on Facebook is through private message threads with my friends from home, but those have slowly worn down as the year as progressed. I do feel the need to have an active Facebook profile so that I feel like I’m still connected because when I come across friends with no new pictures, posts, or comments, it gives of the impression that they are socially inactive. I know that this judgment isn’t totally true, but since Facebook is becoming such an important part of teenage social life, keeping up with ones connections of Facebook is the most public showing of social status, and its extremely addicting.

I feel like teens don’t fully understand privacy settings on Facebook, I know I sure don’t, but there is enough understanding of possible threats that teens post as much information as they deem fit for their online purposes, depending on their curiosity level. This amount of information surpasses what older generations would be comfortable with, but I guess thats the difference with the Information Age. 

People like Elena and the girls interviewed in Smith’s piece on online support of Anorexia, use the Internet not as just a place to connect, but  a place to be supported. Elena gains self confidence through her friends complements on her many pictures, and the girls suffering with eating disorders gain strength through web media like McEvoy’s song “Sophie” . These pieces act a support by making these girls feel connected and not so isolated with their problems. On YouTube they are able to talk about their problems in a public, yet concentrated environment which is comforting. In class when we were trying to find racist websites I ended up finding a whole slew of ‘coming out’ youtube videos and stoires which were really powerful. They were backed with video responses and supportive, even flirtatious comments and it was clear that these questioning young boys were really benefiting from the broadcasting of each other’s stories.

The two articles this week focused in on the presence and scope of race and identity on the internet. Jones’ article took an in depth sociological journey through the idea of ethnicity throughout history and applied it today’s information society. What he saw was that in this age of globalization ethnicity is more constructed than ever before and less grounded in space and time.  Jones argues that identity is no longer, “pertained to an original, pure ethnicity” because, “globalism impels us to conceive a new localism affected by the grace of the link with others” (105) Identity used to be something that grouped people together and formed boundaries, but now identity is able to cross boundaries and connect people from around the world. It takes a more deliberate structure by learning from others around us, “it becomes a moment of self-construction through the other” because the access to various ideas are available and constantly in contact with each other.  A major question raised in this article was the legitimacy or true idea of virtual identity and what implications it may have or not have on society. What I got out of the whole argument was that identity being placed in the virtual sphere (the loss of physical face to face contact) is a distinction from the modern and postmodern views of history and identity because like the postmodern view, the narrator has more autonomy on his own history, but with in influx of new technologies the indivudal memory has the ability to be woven into the ,”ephemeral film of current events” (195). This again makes identity more individualized.

What I found most convincing about his article was the notion that different ethnic groups (he used Jews for the most part) have the ability to connect and grow stronger through the internet because the ebb and flow of ideas is much smoother. Since a lot of religion is  about ideas and converting and relating ancient texts to modern day life, the internet can be seen as perfect support tool for people with the same interest groups and this interaction creates a working definition of one’s own identity through the natural process of contradiction.

McLelland’s article focused on the idea of race on the internet, and more specifically on the Japanese web circuit which is seen to be its own milleu because of the concentration of the language in Japan. The author makes a clear distinction from the idea of race on the Japanese circuit and it a phenomeon that is rarely studied. It primarily concerns the pureness of one’s blood and the issue to where one was born. This issue of race here can’t really be seen too much in face to face contact because many outsiders (Koreans) have assimilated so well into every day living and there is no clear economically disadvantage between the majority or minority groups. It is seen as a major topic in chat rooms like 2-chnneru. However since the chartroom is primarily used by just the country of Japan, the ideas of race follow a very pro-pure-blood-Japanese stance and primarily just denigrates Japan’s immediate neighbors.

It seems to be that with the distinct separation from language the flow Japanese ideas of race would not go through as much contradiction compared to larger more disperse language groups. Frequently I find myself on Japanese websites for illegal tv-show-watching, but I obviously have no idea what is being said around me in the comment and advertisements. This article really opened my eyes because I though race was something that was overcome through the internet because you could join without a face, but that might be an idea that only works with the Western idea of race which is constantly being contested and shaped but interactions with various ethnicities and countries,

So far in class we have discussed the issue of digital divides, and we have highlighted them as being the major problem or flaw of the information society. The internet was supposed to provide universal access of information with no sense of hierarchy, but as both articles point out:  the internet has deepened the social divides of income and education. The internet has not changed the make-up of society, it has instead heightened and cemented the iron cage of social inequalities. Witte and Mannon sifted through data comparing internet usage from Pew Internet and American Life Project which focused and compared  U.S. usage in 2000 and 2007.  They analyzed the data by looking at individual variables. The data showed that even though internet usage has increased across the board, the inequalities between income and education has either increased or not changed over time.

Education and income, sometimes seen as going hand in hand were the major players in the differences between internet usage. Higher education usually means a higher income for the individual, but also the data showed that people with jobs used internet more on a daily basis which corresponded to the increased disparity between people with higher education. It wasn’t just the lack of internet that created the boundaries between to two groups, but the combination of access, wealth and knowledge making it so the only real way to level the playing field would be to totally arrange and disembody the structure of society.

One aspect of the data collected that I thought was especially telling was the different usages of internet through the top 10 usages and the recent growth catagory. Through these two finding we can see that currently most internet usage is from information gathering activity which can add to the education dispairty between groups, but more importantly networking through blogs and sites are becoming more and more popular which will connect the upper and middle classes even more while leaving the poor, uninformed and out of the loop. 

Norris looked at the issue of digital inequalities at a more macro level by questioning the very same notion that Witte and Mannon looked at: it order to elevate socioeconomic differences is is necessary to give the internet to struggling populations or will new technologies not be enough to make a difference between populations.  This article seemed to be a little dated as technology has been more of a regular daily part of most people’s lives, thus there area lot of updated hypothesis to build upon. Most importantly is the influence of the internet on politics; Norris analysis only speculates what the internet will do to poltics without any real available evidence. His guess that, the most powerful parties will have the upper hand with more reasources to contiune their dominance on the politcal front was seen in the 2010 election with both major canidates using internet as a powerful tool. Also in politics, smaller voices can be heard in more profound ways through online media, but they gain their power indirectly through exposure, but can’t really shake the exisitng structures of our government.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYGGdMVaBqU&feature=channel

Chirstine Williams takes what Norris calls a ‘cyber-optomist’ approach to the future of e-politics and I tend to agree with her view. Even though the internet has not given the average joe a shot at becoming president, it gives him a greater voice in the process and that makes the whole process more bottom up and more of a grassroots approach which brings about even greater democracy. I do not see other groups taking over the American government, but with politics now interacting on the internet candidates need to take into account even more the voices of the people.

“I write about my life”

Connection are for airports, people just want to get information in our own separate spheres. There is no real idea of privacy anymore, its normal to put our lives on the public sphere.

You can’t put a voice in writing, but if you say everything on the record you just hear the facts. It makes a higher accountability of everyone’s actions if everything is written down: god watching… don’t say things you don’t mean.

There is nothing that she doesn’t share which makes her social capital really strong, people connected and invest in her life by sharing everything. People do know each other , they share everything… willing to share a kidney. People who see each other everyday are less adapt to show everything. Its harder to speak your mind when people are looking at you

Frankie has to tell everything: if she picks and chooses everything she says on the blog then she feels like she is being dishonest which would ruin the honesty and legtimacy of the online relationship.

No one has to be alone again because you can always find someone who has a shared interest. But putting everything online makes their life a game, viewers become the audience and they take control over the offline life.

“I hate that you don’t have a blog, I hate that  don’t know what you are thinking”

Even she has secrets, everyone should have them, they keep us safe… but can be danegerous

People fill in the blanks with face to face communication

Both articles for this week explored the effects of social capital fro online networking programs. One explored the effects on Facebook through a sampling of college students and the other looked a business networking site, Beehive. The major difference between the two studies was the frequency of usage between the members of the network and the application of the network in the individuals daily lives. Facebook has a much higher usage rate and people who have an account tend to use it more often. Yet both studies reported that an increase in usage intensity heighten each users social capital. More descriptively the studies dove into the different types of social capital that can be maintained or created on these sites: bonding (actual close emotionally supportive type), bridging (weak ties) and maintained social capital (close but disparate bonds i.e high school friends).  What they found is that the network sites are most useful to create bridging and maintained social networks and both studies found that these sites were most useful for people that have trouble creating social networks in person because of geographic displacement through moves or social awkwardness.

I found the study on facebook most interesting and insightful. Most research on Facebook addresses the possible dangers and privacy settings that the network has and that people abuse, but this really got to the core of what people use facebook have: to maintain and strengthen relationships. I wouldn’t say that I have met anyone on facebook, even though some of my ‘friends’ I would use some introduction to, but I have maintain weak ties with people I have met in passing that I probably would have forgotten otherwise. Now when you meet someone at a party, or a group of people at some function or even hear about your friend’s or brothers new girlfriend, it is natural to friend them on facebook and with that friendship you become permanent followers of their lives, or at least their self-made threads. “Checking people out” on facebook is becoming a huge trend, but when I catch myself in the middle of a intensive facebook prowl, I usually think to myself, I wonder what this person thinks of me when they look at my facebook… Its kind of scary how much one can gleam, or think they can gleam from something totally web-based, but profiles are becoming really important in at least my culture.

But I see the way profiles can be misleading when I try to get a handle of my high school friends profiles, they only show glimpses of everyday activity and reading too much into a wall post or a picture can create false realities. I do believe however that I do keep in better contact with my friends from home through our facebook thread and just seeing their faces on my newsfeed every so often… they still feel like a part of my every day routine