You Tube as a Cultural Form - Essay Example

You Tube: As a cultural form how it appropriates and exploits other media. Media is a powerful instrument that imposes its own assumptions on our modes of perception and it has high specialization to mold our sensibilities. Among all forms of technology, mass media have special characteristics of generating meaning and manipulating experience. The speedy information communication in the electronic-age has become the largest consumer function in the world, and the electronic media has changed present world to a global village. Understanding effects of media in the changing world and engaging in media study require “illustrating the dynamic symmetries” of various media like press, radio, or television. (McLuhan 172). It is relevant to understand the repercussions of internet as a new form of public sphere and to understand how the networked future might be different from what we have known about the new mode of public interaction and opinion making. You Tube remains an interesting study in marketing a consumer internet service in the changing scenario of mass media. Its reach, ubiquity, and sheer volume of content, everything from dumb home movies to glossy commercial calling cards, make it “easily dismissible as merely the latest purveyor of trivial, banal, repetitious distractions for an eagerly narcotized booboisie” (Cloud). In this context, it is essential to examine whether You Tube, as a socio-cultural medium, appropriates and exploits other media or not. All social changes contain elements of continuity and assertion of novelty is always a tricky enterprise. Our speech, print, and audio-visual media have always constituted the strictures and frameworks for the objective of social setup, as these media act as a powerful instrument capable to impose its assumptions on our modes of perception. In the electronic age understanding the effect of media in social change involve shaping and transfer of opinion and illustrating the dynamic symmetries of their operation on man and society. All these years press, radio, or television was most effective in gaining the participation of viewers, which is being replaced by multimedia, particularly internet. It is argued that Multimedia environment is shallow, fast-paced, with more swiftly consumable content, and has much greater competition inherent in it, is actually taking us in the wrong direction. Internet demonstrates this amply with its chaos of scams, porn, celebrity-worship sites, and ads that demand attention with jittery images. It is also argued that Internet is some kind of electronic savior as it acts as a platform for pursuing the truth, and the decentralized creation and distribution of ideas, in the same way that markets are a decentralized mechanism for the creation and distribution of goods and services. In Western civilization the public sphere was a place where people could talk as equals and engage in frank discussions, where rational arguments prevailed for consensus goals as well as political opinion. Now, there is major shift in public sphere and the approach to political opinion making, with the initiation of electronic media in political discourses. According to Mark Poster (2003) “Political discourses has long been mediated by electronic machines: the issue now is that these machines have enabled new forms of decentralized dialog and created unique combinations of human-machine assemblages—individual and collective “voices” that are the modern building blocks of political formations and groupings.” The question posed by him “If the current media technology (television) is viewed as a threat to democracy, how can we account for a technology like the Internet, which appears to decentralize communication but enhance democracy?” is to be answered in conjunction with the success story of You Tube. (Poster). Video-sharing hub You Tube and Social-networking hotspot MySpace cater to a huge crowd of net users and You Tube claim to have “40 million plays a day and Myspace pulls more monthly visitors than Amazon and is closing in on AOL and eBay.” (Boutin, Paul, 2006). You Tube, the very name that has come to stand for every other such site on the Web, has clearly emerged as the greatest new media consuming all players in the field. It caught public attention when Google acquired it in October 2006, which was the largest exit for a consumer Internet company. You Tube brought into the mainstream the concept of sharing videos online, which was considered as a cumbersome process. The success of You Tube was its engineering ingenuity and creativity in eliminating the need for downloads and local media players. It helped users in searching for videos by keywords; share them by mailing links to the videos; and also rate and comment on these videos. You Tube was able to adopt what worked in the world of picture-sharing to the world of video-sharing. Distributing popular and hard-to-find video clips was clearly a success factor, but being a free-form platform that allowed users to upload content, You Tube was [and is] engaging in copyright violation. The marketing strategy of You Tube, allowing users to easily embed any hosted videos on web pages or blogs, made it more popular social networking websites within a short span from its launch. As the founders allowed people to share videos for online auctions, and post whatever they wanted, many people were linking to You Tube from their MySpace pages. This helped the expansion of You Tube as single player in the field of video sharing. With its easy accessibility and mass acceptance You Tube is dominating the multimedia by appropriating and exploiting other media. It is viewed that “individuals control the media now, in a whole new way, and the world will never be the same.” (Grossman). In the opinion of You Tube viewers, they find it ‘more entertaining, much more real than the run-of-the-mill reality show’ and ‘people are bored with the mainstream media’. For some “the world is coming together in one place and just sharing all that is in it” as it has the power to forge international bonds because it works in an entirely nonverbal medium. (Grossman). Face book is also working as a social-networking website for many people, more efficiently and publicly, replacing phone, which was used as the main medium for gossiping and exchanging personal information. Another group is military bloggars, unlike generations of soldiers before them they are writing for history, and You Tube has made it all possible. It shows that the influence of newspaper and magazine critics is on the wane, as people increasingly like to pay attention to amateur online reviewers and bloggars. It may be seen that the arenas for debate on public affairs and society have largely been replaced by television and other forms of media that “arguably isolate citizens form one another rather than bring them together.” (Poster). Now political discourses are mediated by electronic machines, which decentralizes dialog and create unique combination of human-machine assemblages. Poster argues that the “Internet threatens the government, mocks private property, and flaunts moral propriety.” Face-to-face group settings with natural means of interaction between participants inevitably create social situations, leading to the emergence of a social domain by the use of directed speech, gestures, and mimics. Ethereal exchange of video texts used in Internet will not substitute face-to-face interactions, as monologist responses may be masked and will be illogical in forming opinions. There are also fundamental differences in defining identity in the public sphere and on the Net. Identity is ingrained in the physical body and it forces individuals to be accountable for their positions and allows trust building between people. Whereas, the Net permits individuals to define their own identities and change them at will, which creates a plethora of contradictory views that does not lead to consensus or forming a stable political community. In addition, the conditions that encourage compromise are lacking on-line, and it is in stark contrast with the public sphere that formulates democratic political process. It is viewed that when information movement speeds up, information level also rises in all areas of mind and society, resulting in substitution of subject of knowledge for any other subject. “Patterns of human association based on slower media have become overnight not only irrelevant and obsolete, but a threat to continued existence and to sanity.” (McLuhan 172). According to Manual Castells (1996: 460), ‘networks’ are “appropriate instruments for a capitalist economy based on innovation, globalization and decentralized concentration” for a “culture of endless deconstruction and reconstruction.” (Wittel 52). It is argued that “in-depth transformations of the system of economic production also alter traditional social structures” as the rise of a network sociality is related to development of information and communication technologies, to the process of globalization and individualization, and to the fact that ‘modern society is society on the move.” (Rosi Braidotti, 1994: 5 and Lash and Urry, 1994: 252 as cited by Wittel, p.52). An example for individual success in the ‘modern society on the move’ is the case of “Kamini: Straight Outta Cowtown” cited by Grossman (2006) in his article ‘Power to the People’. Kamini, a non-entity from a tiny town in the French countryside called Marly-Gomont wanted to be a hip-hop artist. He recorded a song and shot a video with a friend, and put the video online, for a total budget of 100 euros. A link to the video “It’s a site that sells custom-print T shirts’, on a bulletin board posted by a record company, shot him to fame as rap star by ‘popular proclamation.’ (Grossman 10). Everything happened in two months, without auditions or promotions, and people using Internet, particularly You Tube, was behind the success story. It shows that people respond to talent and authentic emotion, and some rules have not changed with the mediation of You Tube. Though, many individual success stories may be drawn from the You Tube it is not exempt from misrepresentations having “narcissist quality to video bogging” (Grossman, 2006). The most viewed You Tube ‘Lonleygirl15’ looked and felt true-life story, but it happened to be a work of fiction, as it was created by two professional screenwriters and an actress from New Zealand. It may be seen that most of the video bloggers does not give out their last name, and their personality is cloaked. Most of them talk about assorted or irrelevant things themselves, contrary to the basic concept of You Tube to be “the public video diary” for people from all walks of life to share a piece of their life with others. It may be seen that though there is certainly a narcissist quality to video blogging, people are mired in watching other people’s video as they are bored with the mainstream media. Wittel (2006) suggest that aspects like trust, loyalty, hierarchy, power, and conflict need to be addressed and investigated in the context of networking by re-examining sociological and anthropological studies of groups and relating these findings to networking practices. The recommendation of McLuhan “New technology creating new basic assumptions at all levels for all enterprises is wholly destructive if new objectives are not orchestrated with the new technological motifs” is also relevant in analyzing the dominance of You Tube as a cultural form. It may be concluded that cultural changes are imminent with the influence of new technological designs, and historical perception of media is also liable to undergo transformation. Works cited Boutin, Paul. A Grand Unified Theory of You Tube and My Space. Point-and-click sites that don’t tell you what to do. 28 Apr. 2006. 13 Apr. 2008. Cloud, J. The You Tube Gurus. Time 25 Dec. 2006. Grossman, Lev. Power to the People. New York: Time. 25 Dec. 2006/1 Jan. 2007. P.42. Vol. 168. Iss.26. Levinson, Paul. Digital McLuhan: A guide to the Information Millennium. London: Routledge. 1999. McLuhan, Marshall. Is it Natural that One Medium Should Appropriate and Exploit Another? Harmondworth: Penguin. 1968. Poster, Mark. The Net as a Public Sphere. Wired Digital. 1994-2003. 13 Apr. 2008. . Wittel, A. Toward a Network Sociality. Theory Culture and Society. Vol.18. P.51. 2001. Read More