YouTube - Utopia or Dystopia?
Friday, September 18, 2009 by Mirandarin
This whole 'Kanye West interrupts Taylor Swift's award speech' ordeal resulted in me scrounging around on YouTube trying to locate original footage of the incident. Orig
inal footage was hard to come by, yet I was bombarded by clips produced by everyday YouTubers expressing their own views on the subject. This got me thinking about our last lecture, and how YouTube measures up against the ‘critical yardstick’ that is the idealised public sphere (that of Habermas).
Both watching and broadcasting videos on YouTube is free. To view any clip (with the exception of those that demand age verification), you don’t even need an account. The site’s slogan of “Broadcast Yourself” addresses the average person, inviting them to share a little (or a lot) of themselves with the world by establishing their own ‘channel’. The comments and video response features encourage interaction between and debate among site users. Citizens of the YouTube community also have the power to ‘flag’ videos (report them as inappropriate), enabling users to have a say regarding which clips should require age verification. While site users range from your average citizen to celebrities, politicians and other significant figures, YouTube gives the impression of placing everyone on a level playing field, where everyone uploads content in the same way, and everyone has the opportunity to get their point across.
And yet, whether YouTube serves as an ideal public sphere of “rational-critical debate” or not remains...debatable. As mentioned in the lecture, debates that take place via the internet are becoming increasingly irrational and emotive. Is it just me, or is YouTube saturated with negative and derogatory comments – serving as a form of modern hate mail – that significantly outnumber the positive gestures? (I'm referring to comments like "Why did you make this video, you [insert swear word here]?") I guess this is hardly surprising when people are/feel anonymous online and are not forced to suffer offline consequences. I have to admit that I’m sceptical about there ever being rational debate online as long as anonymity is a factor, as more often than not, it seems, people take advantage of being in an anonymous position.
inal footage was hard to come by, yet I was bombarded by clips produced by everyday YouTubers expressing their own views on the subject. This got me thinking about our last lecture, and how YouTube measures up against the ‘critical yardstick’ that is the idealised public sphere (that of Habermas).Both watching and broadcasting videos on YouTube is free. To view any clip (with the exception of those that demand age verification), you don’t even need an account. The site’s slogan of “Broadcast Yourself” addresses the average person, inviting them to share a little (or a lot) of themselves with the world by establishing their own ‘channel’. The comments and video response features encourage interaction between and debate among site users. Citizens of the YouTube community also have the power to ‘flag’ videos (report them as inappropriate), enabling users to have a say regarding which clips should require age verification. While site users range from your average citizen to celebrities, politicians and other significant figures, YouTube gives the impression of placing everyone on a level playing field, where everyone uploads content in the same way, and everyone has the opportunity to get their point across.
And yet, whether YouTube serves as an ideal public sphere of “rational-critical debate” or not remains...debatable. As mentioned in the lecture, debates that take place via the internet are becoming increasingly irrational and emotive. Is it just me, or is YouTube saturated with negative and derogatory comments – serving as a form of modern hate mail – that significantly outnumber the positive gestures? (I'm referring to comments like "Why did you make this video, you [insert swear word here]?") I guess this is hardly surprising when people are/feel anonymous online and are not forced to suffer offline consequences. I have to admit that I’m sceptical about there ever being rational debate online as long as anonymity is a factor, as more often than not, it seems, people take advantage of being in an anonymous position.
The level of "debate" on YouTube tends to be very much as you suggest here. It seems to be quite a contrast to, say, the discussion pages behind Wikipedia which, whilst themselves prone to irrational prejudices on occasion, tend towards a generally more "civil" and reasoned kind of discourse.