March 17, 2007
YouTube and its community of `produsers' are rewriting the television rulebook, writes Rosemary Sorensen
EVERY day millions of people choose to watch dubious quality amateur videos on the screens of their personal computers. No one anticipated the trend. Not so many years ago no one imagined sites devoted to free-access video sharing would be so popular they would attract billions of investment dollars. And no one foresaw that, within a couple of years, media watchers would be talking about an end to the TV era.
Now, corporations, advertisers and creators are trying to figure out how to harness the haphazard and volatile energy of video sharing. This is the story of YouTube and its ilk, a story that has millions of happy endings: maybe.
It's a story, according to Axel Bruns, about the end of the industrial age. The Queensland University of Technology academic is analysing the way online sites such as YouTube (a user-created online video bank) and Wikipedia (a user-created online encyclopedia) are changing the power relationships between producers and users. Bruns says that what we are seeing is a fundamental shift in the model of consumption that grew out of the industrial revolution. This is the "user-led future" of communications.
"Industrial-age approaches to the production and distribution of goods," Bruns says, rely on a "one-way value chain from production through distribution to consumption". A TV network makes a program, a newspaper prints an edition, it's sent out by producer-controlled networks and we look at it or read it.
The new forms of network-based distribution are no longer dependent on or controlled by the producers. Not only will the core business of the producer change (from selling a product to value-adding services around it) but there will also be a fundamental shift in the form of production. Bruns calls it by the inelegant term, produsage. Produsage describes a "collaborative, participatory mode" that enables users to build and extend information and knowledge.
Wikipedia, a constantly evolving and potentially up-to-the-minute encyclopedia of information about everything and anything its users choose to add, is the classic example of how this works. Bruns suggests that it is self-regulating, because its reputation and viability depend on the ethical behaviour of its produsers. Although it's open to hijacking by "corporate and institutional interests", Wikipedia is not a product in the traditional industrial-age sense. Rather, it is a process created by a network of users who function like a community and whose mutual self-interest keeps it, if not free from, at least alert to, corruption. (Although the task of keeping out bias and misinformation completely is beyond the best self-monitoring system.)
YouTube was developed by a couple of 30-year-olds, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, in San Bruno, California. It works off a similar produsage model, providing a well-designed platform for users to upload their videos, which are then viewed by potentially millions of people. Because each viewing is registered and the tally displayed on the site, "most watched" becomes the simplistic measure of the best videos.
It is so successful in attracting the kind of large viewer numbers that make advertisers go weak at the knees precisely because it is not advertising-dependent, which gives it a perceived advantage over commercial TV, for instance.
But those large numbers are often attracted by videos copied from commercial TV, which is why Google, which owns YouTube after paying $US1.65 billion ($2.12billion) late last year, has an interesting time ahead trying to keep the site's reputation as an independent grab-bag into which you can dip at your leisure and according to your whim, while at the same time satisfying the complex requirements and demands of the old-fashioned producers who can see money being made from their products, no matter how repackaged they are into new forms of music and performance by people who present their creations on YouTube.
Bruns says this new world belongs to generation C (which stands for content and creativity, according to Trendwatching.com) which is using the developing technologies of a Web 2.0 environment to make collaboration the new mode of production. But you've got to be quick to stay up with these new worlds. Web watchers, anticipating user reaction to the commercialisation of sites such as YouTube, are talking about Web 3.0. Using software applications that are ever more sophisticated in enabling collaboration, Web 3.0 describes a world divided into tribes whose members may be physically anywhere but whose constant, immediate contact builds strong relationships based on shared information.
YouTube, anticipating the Web 3.0 backlash, has announced plans to share advertising revenue with produsers. But some users appear to be happy to provide the web content gratis, even if it is then commercially exploited. Learning lessons from the popularity of TV viewer voting systems in shows such as Big Brother, companies have begun to invite people to create ads about why they like eating pizzas or burgers, the winner to become their new ad. Many of the entries are posted on YouTube, so the site provides a quick, free, widespread ad campaign and the advertiser doesn't even have to make the ad.
According to one company using this adaptation of the produsage model to advertise its fast food, people become not just customers but fans who feel a personal connection with what they choose to eat or what they view on screen.
Non-fans will wonder why there's so much fuss. Log on to YouTube and you may see a music film clip of some up-and-coming band, a grainy minute or so of some celebrity making a fool of themselves, a teenager in their bedroom telling you about themselves (who may be a real teenager or a character created by a wannabe actor, hoping for a knock-on effect if the video gains notoriety). Some are serious attempts at video art, others are family bloopers, the kind of thing you see on the funniest home video shows on TV.
When I searched for Australian rules football, I found a cute two-minute video made by a family of Carlton supporters that was a narrative about how they wreaked revenge on the narky nuisance of a Collingwood fan down the road. That had drawn some incredibly nasty responses from real-time Collingwood supporters, but it amused me so much, I tried to call it back to show a friend a few days later. Alas, all I could find were videos of players biffing each other and fan videos of Australian soccer. It's the haphazard nature of Youtube that appeals to the graze-for-leisure mind-set made possible by the internet.
Then again, you might see nothing at all. You might select and prepare to download a video but give up when you discover it takes forever to access a download you weren't really sure you wanted to watch in the first place. The scandalous problem of Australia's slow broadband speeds may mean that your viewing of a five-minute video takes two or three times longer, and you'll decide to log off and read a book instead.
Older viewers may feel watching online videos is a 21st-century version of that family slide night you would do anything, as a child, to get out of. You may switch off the computer thinking this brave new world can do without you.
It is a brave new world that contains some knotty intellectual copyright problems. From the TV network producers' point of view, it's simple: we made the show-clip-video and we control its usage. In the two years YouTube's been online, pirated copies of TV shows and film clips have proliferated. YouTube countered by, first, limiting the length of the videos posted to the site, then seeking out deals with groups of companies.
Their responses were hastened by the instigation of legal action by aggrieved media companies. Last week US media organisation Viacom demanded Google remove 100,000 clips it claimed were copyright. But even as companies demand the removal of video clips from the site more than 1000 "content owners" (such as US TV networks CBS and NBC, as well as the BBC) have entered into partnership with YouTube, creating channels on the site dedicated to their own content. Entertainment organisations, such as the American National Basketball Association, are also using a YouTube channel as a fan site.
YouTube may seem like a promiscuous free-for-all, allowing anyone to upload a video -- everything from promotional rock clips to sermons -- but it's all traceable; you can watch without registering but if you want to upload two minutes of footage from your baby's christening party, or a slice of your favourite TV show, you leave your imprint. If you want to send a comment about how much you enjoyed sharing vision of that adorable baby or hated the TV show, you also have to register.
Legal challenges to YouTube to release the identities of users who have uploaded copyright material has sharpened discussions about the ethics of what is being called the new communications paradigm. Is it exploitative to allow users to generate content voluntarily but then to generate profits from the site? How do you prevent special interest groups hijacking the site?
While organisations such as YouTube have an investment in keeping the site ethical because a clean reputation is important to their user rates, Bruns says it's also "a crucial task for individual produsers themselves, who must develop a better understanding of what, how, and why they contribute as individuals to produsage projects".
Sarah-Jane Woulahan, a 30-year-old Brisbane video maker, says it's the anarchic potential of such sites that interests her. She set up a video-sharing site called killyourtv for her friends and colleagues a few years ago. When YouTube came along, Woulahan immediately saw it as a chance to expand her site's potential.
"We wanted to be independent and a bit anarchic but we knew we needed to develop our software so when this came along, it was perfect. I'm really interested in the social networks it creates, and the development of creative communities." Woulahan says.
To make a living, Woulahan makes music videos for bands in Brisbane. But she says there's a great deal of interest, from mainstream media and from government funding agencies, in the product coming out of the YouTube channel she has set up to replace killyourtv, Ministryoftruth.
The first step for Woulahan was to create a space within YouTube where she could archive the work of like-minded video makers, and now she's in second-phase mode, trying to attract new work that fits the group's identity. She is also thinking about how to market her channel, harnessing tricks of the trade such as tagging, so that viewers happen upon her videos rather than the millions of others vying for attention.
"I'd like it to be an active community," Woulahan says, "and I want to see video work that's funny, enjoyable and challenging, something with authenticity and integrity, a niche for independent filmmakers."
The lofty intentions are colliding, happily, with the practical advantages available to a small-time filmmaker. Woulahan, part of a like-minded group of young people behind an alternative arts festival in Brisbane that has struggled for years to get government funding and sponsorship, is discovering she can tap into expertise she would never have had access to in the pre-Web 2.0 days.
"It's now so easy to collaborate via the web, whereas before you couldn't have made contact without perhaps travelling to a festival, or being in another state. It was so much more expensive.
"The web may seem like an unmediated mess of opinions and ideas but there's room to clash, and at least you know where everyone stands. It's honest, and when there is negativity (in the responses to videos, for example), I don't think that it is enough to cancel out the honesty."
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