C3 NEWSLETTER

Opening Note

YouTube: Online Video

By: Joshua Green (with Jean Burgess)

This paper reports on a three month study of over 4,300 videos on YouTube, analysing content and uploader types as well as patterns in the popularity of content across the site. It does some very needed but very rudimentary analysis about the nature of videos on the servicem, looking at where they come from, who have uploaded them, and what they appear to be. In doing so, this study provides some analysis about how the site functions; Despite increasing interest and attention from scholarly and business circles, there is still little work that examines YouTube as a cultural system, that looks at the range of content on the site and the way videos move through the service.

YouTube has emerged as a significant part of the mainstream cultural landscape. Though not the only video-sharing website on the Internet, YouTube’s rapid rise, diverse range of content and public prominence in the Western, English-speaking world makes it an important space for understanding the evolving relationships between media, business, citizens and popular culture. It is one of the most heavily trafficked video sites on the ‘net, and a key site where disputes about new business models, forms of media, and modes of cultural participation are taking place.

Most versions of YouTube’s history conform to the Silicon Valley myth of the garage entrepreneur, where technology and business innovation comes from youthful visionaries working outside of established enterprises; where out of humble origins in an office over a pizzeria with a paper sign on the door (Allison 2006) a multi- billion dollar success story emerges. In this story, the moment of success arrives in October 2006, when YouTube was bought by Google for $1.65 billion. By November 2007 it was the most popular entertainment website in Britain, with the BBC website in second place, and in early 2008 it was consistently in the top ten most visited websites globally, according to various web metrics services. As of March 2008, YouTube hosts upwards of 75 million videos, a number that represents a tenfold increase over the previous year and that continues to increase exponentially. Internet market research company comScore reported the service accounted for 37 percent of all Internet videos watched inside the US, with the next largest service, Fox Interactive Media, accounting for only 4.2 percent. As a user-created content community, its size and reach are now utterly unprecedented.

YouTube’s ascendancy has occurred amid a fog of uncertainty and contradiction around what it is actually for. Unlike Facebook or the Wikipedia, YouTube’s apparent or stated mission has morphed as a result of both corporate practices and audience use. In it’s early days, the website carried the byline ‘Your Digital Video Repository’, a statement which conflicts somewhat with the now- notorious exhortation to ‘Broadcast Yourself’. This shift from the idea of the site as a personal storage facility for video content to a platform for public self-expression weds YouTube to the � ��participatory turn’ that characterises rhetoric around � ��Web 2.0’ (Grossman, 2006). Despite insistence the service was designed for sharing personal videos among existing social networks, it was a combination of the mass popularity of particular user-created videos with the uses of YouTube to access shared cultural moment that captured the public imagination. It is also this combination that has positioned the site as a key place where disputes over copyright and the market structures of online video distribution are taking place.

YouTube’s business practices have proven particularly controversial, both with the old-media guard and some of the most active members of YouTube’s social network. While some Big Content players -- large media producers and rights holders such as the Warner and Universal Music Groups, have signed revenue sharing deals with YouTube,8 others have rejected the revenue sharing deals YouTube offers, arguing the service induces and profits from copyright infringement (Helft, 2008). Large media companies such as Viacom in the US, Mediaset in Italy, and TF1 in France have launched legal proceedings against YouTube, Inc. in an attempt to resolve what they see as illicit business practices.

At the same time, some of the most active members of the YouTube social network have expressed discomfort with the interjection of corporate players such as Oprah Winfrey into a space they experience as community generated. This neglects the fact their community interactions are supported by a corporate space that has since its inception, been made up of commercial and non-commercial participants; it is a space that supports and can accomodate legitimate commercial and non-commercial activities. Indeed, part of the significance of the site is due precisely to the way it supports the interactions between commcerial and non-commercial uses and users.

The discomfort of both corporate and vernacular participants point to the generative value of YouTube, which emerges from its simultaneous status as a high-volume website, a broadcast platform, a media archive, and a social network. This value does not come solely or even predominantly from the top-down activities of YouTube Inc. as a company, but rather, is collectively produced by ‘users’ en masse via their consumption, evaluation and entrepreneurial activities. On YouTube, co-created value is core business.

To shed light on the way value is created on YouTube, and discuss the site beyond moral panics about young people, the destruction of existing media business, copyright infringement, or the trivialities of user-created content, this study will contextualize content on the site within everyday media practices. The report draws on a sample from four of YouTube’s own categories of popularity - Most Viewed, Most Favorited, Most Responded, Most Discussed. From these categories, 4,320 videos were gathered by sampling six days over two weeks in three monts of 2007 (August, October, and November) and a coding system developed to categorize the videos according to textual and extra-textual features.

This survey concentrated on the most popular videos in an attempt to understand some of the dominant patterns in popular uses of YouTube. Working through these patterns we attempt to locate the � ��YouTubeness’ of YouTube—its shared and particular � ��common culture’—while respecting its complexity and diversity. We look not only at the mix of content that moves through the service but at the particular patterns of relations between videos on the site and the organization of YouTube itself.

But understanding how popularity works on YouTube requires more than simply identifying and describing which of the videos have been watched the most. Is the ‘popular’ simply a matter of degree--how popular a particular cultural product is, measured by its reach or sales? Or is it a matter of kind--the cultural forms that are loved intensely, or that are ‘of the people’? Even within YouTube itself, content is represented as being more or less � ��popular’ according to a range of different measures. Concentrating on four of them, this survey reveals the way different kinds of video content is made popular by audiences in different ways.

As such, this content survey isn’t about understanding � ��what” is on YouTube but about understanding how the different types of content that make up YouTube allow different constitutions of YouTube to be drawn. Looking not only at the fact that there is traditional media content, or fan remixes, or user- created material on the site, but at where this material is on the site, who it is uploaded by and the relationship it might have to other types of content (by exploring the content according to different measures of popularity which stand as a way to understand different orientations to it and thus different “uses”), we are able to look at what YouTube is and how it works.

This report demonstrates:

the range and extent of content on the site;
the diversity of uploaders, forcing us to reconsider the range of participants within 'participatory culture;
patterns of popularity across the site, revealing where user-created and traditional media content are most popular;
the uses of videos posted to YouTube to catch up on content, for identity, to perform your membership of a particular taste community, and for cultural expression.

Further, this report argues that notions of 'piracy' and 'copyright infringement' are flawed ways to understand the use of copyrighted content on YouTube, ideas rooted in broadcast-era understandings of how the media works which mis-understand YouTube for a distribution platform. YouTube is a place where once hidden audience behaviors are made apparent, and an important site for understanding the patterns of relationship that define participatory media. It suggests incumbent media players need to adjust to their status as participants within a cultural production and reception system.

Joshua Green is a Post-Doctoral Researcher at the Comparative Media Studies program at MIT, and formerly Research Manager of the Convergence Culture Consortium. Jean Burgess is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation (CCI) at the Queensland University of Technology.

Essay

Marginalizing Older Audiences

By: Lee Harrington

Last time I wrote about the marginalization of older audiences by media advertisers due to long-held assumptions about elders’ minimal buying power, entrenched brand loyalty, low volume consumption, and non-existent hip factor. The aging of the Baby Boomers, the first generation to be raised with television and the first cohort of which became eligible for Social Security benefits in January of 2008, is interesting to media marketers since Boomers deviate from these stereotypical age-based purchasing patterns, but the emphasis on the youth demographic in most media markets remains firmly entrenched. Joseph Turow (1997) points out that industry efforts to construct audiences are ultimately efforts to identify which people in society matter, and by implication, which do not. Those efforts are also important for understanding the types of entertainment content that ultimately get delivered to people.

In my May C3 blog post, I wrote about the negative construction of older audiences in the context of daytime soap operas, and its implications for veteran actors in terms of the types of narratives written for their characters. A major part of the problem, which I didn’t talk about in May, is the sheer financial cost of using vets, regardless of their age. In 2003 NBC’s Days of Our Lives launched a serial killer storyline with the bulk of targeted characters (totaling seven) being portrayed by long-term actors, only one of whom was under the age of 40. This seemingly drastic cost- cutting measure was not as age-biased as it first appeared, as most of those killed did not end up being dead after all (ah, soaps!), but it sparked an ongoing discussion on soap fan boards about the uncertain fate of older actors/characters. In fact, ABC Daytime President Brian Frons defended a One Life to Live serial killer storyline that launched near the same time as “not a story about elder-cide� ��. As the economics of daytime become ever grimmer, production cuts underway at all three networks are hitting vets the hardest. Once- established contract perks are disappearing, guarantees are shrinking, and contract negotiations are becoming more hardball by the minute. Soap Opera Digest recently pointed out that the somewhat puzzling practice of killing off vets only to have them reappear as ghosts allows soaps to retain fan favorites on-screen (General Hospital� ��s Stuart Damon, for example) but on much less costly basis.

I’d like to focus a little more today about the marginalization of older audiences in media studies. In part, the treatment of elders in both industry and academia is a direct reflection of more macro- level age-based stereotyping and discrimination. Even scholars working in gerontology, the discipline devoted to the study of age and aging, have openly wrestled with their own ageism (manifested, for example, in a preference for the study of the “young-old” rather than the “old-old”). In media studies, older adults are under-theorized and under-studied compared to other age groups. Despite the late 1980s emergence in cultural studies of the active audience perspective, media consumption among older persons is still presumed to mimic the classic hypodermic needle model of communication transmission – that is, media consumption as a � ��monolithically unimaginative” experience for elders, a � ��catatonic absorption of meaningless fog” (Riggs 1998, 5, 172). In the context of television, we know that older adults watch more TV than any other age group. Why? One perspective argues that age differences in consumption habits reflect specific life events such as getting married, having children, retiring, losing a spouse etc. In other words, people of the same age (age clusters) share consumption habits because they share central life experiences. An alternative perspective holds that age cohorts adopt specific patterns of media use and continue those patterns throughout the life course. From this perspective, “Maybe older viewers now watch differently compared to younger viewers, but they do so because they’ve always been different, not because they are older” (Mares and Woodard, 2006, 596). Research concludes that “There are maturational differences in amount of viewing that are not explained by cohort (generational) effects…However, the relationship between age and viewing is very small” (2006, 610). In other words, simply having more free time is overall the best explanation for older adults’ heavy TV usage.

What interests me here is that scholars still routinely treat these heavy viewing habits as de facto problematic, signifying loneliness, potential vulnerability (in contributing to TV-based perceptions of reality, for example), disengagement from social life, and near-total passivity. All of the tired myths about TV consumption in the 1950s and 1960s (and 70s and 80s….) remain alive and well when the audience is older. Very little research looks at the possible meanings and usages of television in elders’ lives from their perspectives, such as its role in maintaining psychological good health (e.g. Goodwin, Intrieri and Papini 2005), or its role in keeping up with current events (e.g. Riggs 1998). As the U.S. population and its media audiences continues to age, these are ever- more-important `research questions.

Goodwin, P.E., Intrieri, R.C. and Papini, D.R. (2005). Older adults affect while watching television. Activities, Adaptation & Aging, 29(2), 55-72.
Mares, Marie-Louise and Emory H. Woodard IV. (2006). In search of the older audience: Adult age differences in television viewing. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 50(4), 595-614.
Rabinowitz, Naomi. (2008). Ghost stories. Soap Opera Digest, 33(31), 64-67.
Riggs, Karen E. (1998). Mature audiences: Television in the life of elders. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Turow, Joseph. (1997). Breaking up America: Advertisers and the new media world. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.

C. Lee Harrington is Professor of Sociology and Affiliate of the Women's Studies Program at Miami University. Current research projects include a study of acting and aging on daytime soaps, and a study of media framing of death row volunteers (inmates who want to be executed) and an in-press book on global television distribution titled Global TV: Exporting Television and Culture in the World Market (2008, NYU Press). She was recently in Boston to attend the Annual Meeting of the American Sociology Association which included a pre- conference event on the media industries.

Letter to the Editor

Thinking About YouTube and the "Source Text"

By: Sam Ford

Having been one of the students in Ted Hovet's "History of Narrative Cinema" class once upon a time myself, I read his Closing Note in the previous C3 Weekly Update with special interest. As all of you know, my last year at C3 as project manager kept me immersed in YouTube culture, as part of the core Consortium team's in-depth look at how various communities were using the video sharing site. Educational extensions, such as the issues Ted discussed in his piece "Film History and the Pedagogical 'Clip' in the Age of YouTube," are important not only for what they mean in the classroom, but in helping understand how people are looking at media.

The crucial point to Ted's piece, for me, was that what is lost by the "sanctity" of the source text when it appears on YouTube is gained in context, where myriad new possibilities are open. When we cross this with all the recent talk about whether or not there is viability in the "Long Tail," as niche content has come to be called in popular industry vernacular, I think a pattern emerges about the increasing importance of context, in both academia and media consumption more broadly.

As educators and researchers, academics--certainly from the C3 perspective, if I can purport that there is group agreement on the issue--are interested in works not in a vacuum but in relation to both trends in the time they were produced and trends in the era they are read in. I know that my experience teaching about a specific franchise with a deep history--especially this past semester, looking at contemporary U.S. soap operas--saw students getting on YouTube and suddenly finding ways to go deep into the backlog of video about their favorite characters, big storylines they had heard about from the past, etc. This content isn't commercially available, and it's been added ad hoc by those who archived their soaps on VHS. In fact, two of my students were driven to do semester research projects about the process of fan archiving itself, using YouTube as the case study, because so many archivists are now on the site. As Ted points out, thinking through how students are interfacing with media content in new ways gives educators all sorts of new possibilities in the classroom, but likewise indicates how the culture at large continues to shift in the way it finds archived content and relates it to the present.

For media producers, context is crucial when it comes to thinking about how people will consume content over the long term. One could argue that these clips from the content of yesteryear, most of which is still under copyright, could be legally taken down by companies. On the other hand, when these clips appear as invitations into a film decades old and YouTube's linking system creates context to show how that film clip is related to a contemporary cultural product, new relevance is granted to the source material in the process. Taking this line of thinking more broadly, it explains how Criterion Collection movies might suddenly find a new audience and a new wave of relevance in the current age; why Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up" is suddenly relevant to a new generation; and ultimately why allowing bits of content to be publicly available may very well be in the best interests of corporations, especially those who are dealing in cultural products that are only as good as the current relevance they have.

Regards,
Sam Ford
MIT C3 Research Affiliate

Sam Ford is a research affiliate with the Convergence Culture Consortium and Director of Customer Insights for Peppercom, a PR agency, working in their Manhattan office. Ford was previously the Consortium's project manager and part of the team who launched the project in 2005.

Closing Note

Revisiting 3D – A Phased Foray into the Third Dimension of Media Images (Part 1 of 3)

By: Stefan Werning

In this week's opening instalment, Stefan provides a detailed and compelling history of 3D technology, which he builds upon in subsequent pieces to point to the ramifications of 3D imagery for the technological and cultural development of cinema, media distribution, video game and television.

The utopian quality of three-dimensional display techniques has repeatedly shaped the media landscape, each time first as a (then-)new medium and, later, as an iconically conservative notion which represents an outdated, static way of thinking about media. Unsurprisingly, the recent investments in 3D movies and, this time, even digital games are again proclaimed as the ‘next big thing� �� and discussed in terms of their potential economic impact as � ��revolutionizing entertainment” (Reuters, 2008). Alongside the strategically established hype around James Cameron’s upcoming 3D movie Avatar (2009) and various experiments with 3D projection by acclaimed directors like Steven Spielberg, major film studios have signaled their interest with Constantin Film following 20th Century Fox, Warner, Sony and Paramount in producing 3D movies. (Wirtschaftswoche, 2008) Film producer Jeffrey Katzenberg even went as far as predicting that, in the near future, two out of three movies will utilize 3D projection.

The costs are thereby estimated to be approximately 10% higher than for regular films, which makes the technology appear lucrative for all but very small studios. However, as for example the German film company Constantin indicates, American expertise (i.e. experts) and equipment are still needed for a transitional period which is peculiarly reminiscent of the early days of film where pioneers like the Indian Dadasaheb Phalke were dependent on Western technology and expertise while at the same time developing a genuine ‘national� �� cinematic rhetoric.

Thus, while the development of more sophisticated 3D representational technologies appears to be a quantitative enhancement (similar e.g. to the introduction of DVD-ROMs which superficially only provided more space than traditional CD-ROMs), a look back into the history of 3D film-making not only foregrounds continuities (and ruptures) but also demonstrates the framing effects of 3D on cinematography, genre and the epistemological status of film itself.

In the 1950s, the so-called ‘golden age’ of 3D films, the use of 3D technologies was designed to counteract the increasing popularity and widespread availability of television, i.e. stemmed as much from economic necessity than from the desire to use 3D effects as a calculated means of expression. Another important ‘external� �� factor was the standardization of film formats at the time which was a prerequisite for stable production conditions; the parallel experimentation with widescreen formats, e.g. using anamorphic lenses as for the Cinemascope format introduced by 20th Century Fox, strongly influenced the development of 3D movies, their temporary decline in the mid-1950s and their re-discovery using single-print formats in the mid-1960s. From that angle, the issue of format standardization is already a first cue that allows for relating the history of 3D film to the (so far) most recent uses of 3D technologies.

Apart from high-level effects of technological factors like this, concrete repercussions on the design imaginary can be identified. For example, since early 3D movies utilized two projectors, the capacity limit on each projector of roughly an hour's worth of film usually necessitated an intermission and, thus, propagated an assumed bipartite structure. Since viewers came to expect an intermission after an hour, the imposed break could be effectively used for narrative purposes, either to comply with or strategically disrupt viewer expectations. Even earlier applications demonstrate technology- driven formal conventions imposed on the media writing process on both the production and reception side; for example, stereoscopic transparency viewers in the 1940s such as the View-Master used rotating cardboard discs that had space for exactly seven views which framed quasi-narrative syntagms applied in contemporary faerie tale scenes, short episodes with popular cartoon characters and other staple genres of the time. More recently, digital camera control by means of software tools adjusting parameters like zoom state, depth of field etc. in real-time lead to a normalization of these parameters to ‘optimize’ the viewing process by making it more comfortable, i.e. ‘subordinating’ these parameters which had been used strategically for narrative purposes in traditional cinema to program code logic. (Greene, 2008)

More generally, in retrospective, the sophistication of 3D effects has always had a noticeable impact on genre consolidation and the crystallization of themes into existing and new genres. For instance, early technical demonstrations presented in 1915 by Edwin S. Porter and William E. Waddell at the Astor Theater in New York revitalized popular Orientalist themes which, in the medium of paintings, had been on decline since the late 19th century. (Lynde, 1915) Thus, the staging of the Orient as ‘spectacle’ was first continued by Porter/Waddell with the familiar motif of oriental dancers already explored in painting but re-contextualized through juxtaposition with five other archetypal scenes such as screenings with popular actress Marie Doro and footage of the Niagara Falls. However, those motifs were later combined with new visual and plot elements that took advantage of the new technologies; for example, later films like Son of Sinbad (1955) starring ‘iconic’ 3D film actor Vincent Price also featured a number of contemporary starlets as harem dancers but the plot revolved around the secret of the ‘greek fire� �� which is used to showcase pyrotechnical effects in 3D at the end of the movie which could not have been aptly rendered using still images.

In this regard, another aspect of the latest level of 3D technologies which can be traced back to 3D experiments in the 1950s and before as well as other key developments in film history is the foregrounding of technological contingencies and their playful exploration which � ��generates’ a fairly predictable spectrum of new syntagms. For example, Cameron indicates how 3D shooting encourages playing with the interocular distance in combination with wide as opposed to long lenses for various effects since the Fusion camera system used for that purpose allows for dynamically shifting between hypo- and hyper- stereo. (Cohen, 2008) From that perspective, the revitalization of 3D appears comparable to developments such as the conventionalization of silent film accompaniment where the technologically-driven aspects of musical composition for the new medium of film were productively emphasized both as design considerations and as an interpretive frame; for example, the strong reliance on piano arrangements most basically made the use of other instruments like violin or percussion a particularly strong stylistic device per se that could be strategically leveraged.

The implied hybridity of 3D display technology is yet another factor which is currently not in the center of public attention but appears obvious in the light of historical contextualization. For example, the call for papers for the IS&T/SPIE Stereoscopic Display and Applications conference (SD&A) mentions “scientific visualization, medical imaging, teleoperation, telepresence, industrial inspection, communications, entertainment, games, broadcast/ cable TV, training, CAD/CAM, molecular modeling, and advertising” as key topics, with 3D cinema being the focal point of the 2009 installment. This suggests an exchange of hands-on experiences and knowledge between experts from all related fields, even though there are currently few publicly announced collaborative projects. (cf. http://www.stereoscopic.org/2009/index.html) In this regard it is worthwhile to mention that, as media scholars like Kittler diagnosed for entertainment media in general, the technological origins of 3D representation lay within the military sphere; stereoscopes had been used already during the First World War to view aerial reconnaissance photography. Thus, implied ‘dual use’ has been a mainstay in 3D developments just as in other areas like digital game technologies being used for military training; therefore, it is surprising that comparatively little collaboration of that sort can (yet) be observed in the context of the recent commercial experimentation with 3D except for the above-mentioned conferences.

The popularity of 3D technologies after the Second World War was accompanied and, in part, motivated by an unprecedented availability to the public, e.g. through the Stereo Realist camera which further naturalized the technology, especially since it established at standardized photo format, the “Realist format”. As suggested above, the issue of format standardization is but one rationale which similarly applies today with the Cameron/Pace collaboration for the Fusion Camera System.

Stefan Werning works in product development for Nintendo of Europe. He recently finished his PhD at the University of Bonn, Germany. He has written on topics ranging from e-learning solutions based on digital games, modelling terrorism in recent military policies to interactive media analysis.