Creation of Celebrities Through Youtube

Justin Bieber (in the ‘ordinary world’)

Justin Bieber (in the ‘media world’)

Building Communities Through Youtube

The topic of this blog is the ability for Youtube to create communities through its use of ranking tactics, which promote the more popular videos in circulation. Firstly, in order to discuss such an idea, the term ‘community’ should be narrowed down, as it is such a general term. Jose van Dijck argues that the term has a strong connotation with belonging to a rea-life group, however, he believes that when it comes to the online community, it can be defined as “groups with a communal preference in music, movies, or books, (a so called ‘taste-community’)”, he then argues that “building taste is an activity that necessarily ties in individuals with social groups” (van Dijck, 45).

Now that the definition for ‘community’ has been outlined, a closer look of how Youtube operates, shall be discussed in greater detail. When an individual is signed into Youtube, the first page they are greeted with presents many attempts, by Youtube, to place them in certain categories. One of the first things on the page is a section with the heading ‘we’ve found some channels that you might like’, below this, are many ‘recommended videos’ which have been picked by the site’s system through wading through the individual’s video search history (youtube.com, 2011) . All of these sections are tools for Youtube to create the personality of the individual, and thus, place them in certain categories. Ranking systems further allow for this to occur, because, when a person is watching a video, they are given options of other similar videos which have been well-received by viewers. These systems and sections have all been introduced by Youtube, in order to categorise viewers into subsections of taste; because if people are watching videos they like, they are more willing to increase its popularity or comment on the videos, which will give the website a feeling of community.

These ranking tactics which have been employed by Youtube are yet another example of the power of produsage being harnessed. Everything about the system requires the user to generate value into the product being presented, and this is the epitome of ‘produsage’ (Bruns, 2008) . Not only are videos created by the users of the website, people who comment on videos, like them, or even watch them, for that matter, are contributing on marginal value onto the product. Popularity on site such as Youtube are based on public perception; and most of the time, the number of likes, comments and views a video receives, all contribute and determine how good a video actually is, and not the actual content.

This blog has tried to present the idea that Youtube’s effective ranking tactic has been able to give people the sense of community, and belonging to a group, through their use of user histories, in order to be able to present individual users with more content which will strengthen their position in that community, through liking and commenting on videos. And finally, the idea of produsage was applied to this case, as a tool for creation of value within videos.

References

Axel Bruns, The Future is User-Led: The Path Towards Widespread Produsage, Fibreculture Journal, Date Published: 2008, Date Accessed, 31 May 2011

Jose van Dijck, ‘Users like you? Theorising agency in user-generated content’, Media, Culture & Society, 31 (2009): 31-58.

Youtube, Youtube.com, Date Published: 2011, Date Accessed: 31 May 2011 <www.youtube.com>

FUN FUN FUN!!!

The above  is an audio version of Glee’s cover of the Rebecca Black song, “Friday”. No, I didn’t just post this to annoy you, but I just wanted to make the point of how certain youtube celebrities enter into the mainstream media and move beyond the limitations of youtube. In this respect, youtube is a great initial step for aspiring celebrities to get a foot into the public’s eye.

I don’t know exactly where I am going with this, but terminologies such as “youtube sensation” means that there is a divide and a difference between the traditional celebrity and youtube hits. I guess this means that somewhere in the definition of “celebrity” it states that the person requires to be in the public eye AND be distributed by the mainstream media…