YouTube (eBook)

CHAPTER TWO

YouTube and the Mainstream Media

YouTube clearly represents a disruption to existing media business models and is emerging as a new site of media power. It has received significant press attention, and is now part, however begrudgingly accepted, of the mainstream media landscape, but it is also regularly used as a vehicle for rehearsing public debates about new media and the Internet as a disruptive force on business and society, particularly with regard to young people. The assumptions underlying these representations of YouTube deserve a closer look.

In engaging with these debates, this chapter draws on a thematic analysis of mainstream media coverage of YouTube throughout 2006 and 2007. What emerges is a set of issues that, while ‘newsworthy’ in the traditional sense, have more to do with the news agenda of mainstream media than with the way YouTube works. It tends to be framed as either as a lawless repository for a flood of amateur content, or (in Business sections particularly) as a big player in the new economy. These definitional frames result in a steady but repetitive stream of news stories clustering around some familiar themes: youth, celebrity, and morality on the one hand; copyright law and media business on the other.

These debates, however familiar, contribute to shaping our understanding of what YouTube is and what matters about it: media discourses – whether celebratory, condemnatory, or somewhere in between – cannot help but both reflect and shape the meaning of new media forms as they evolve. Media ‘framing’ (De Vreese, 2005) and reality create each other, forming a dynamic feedback loop, so that the mainstream or incumbent media’s struggles to comprehend and make sense of the meanings and implications of YouTube not only reflect public concerns, but also help to produce them. The repetitive framing of YouTube as an amateur ‘free-for-all’ rather than a place for community or artistic experimentation, for instance, situates it as a space where the public or the masses are rising up from the bottom, so that the matters of concern around it have to do with lawlessness, the crisis of expertise, and the collapse of cultural value. Similarly, mainstream media discourses about YouTube have the power to define the issues that may later be realized in policy, in law, and even in material form, so concern about ‘piracy’ or ‘cyberbullying’ can give the impression that regulatory interventions are required – like Digital Rights Management (DRM) to fight piracy, or blocking YouTube on school computers to fight cyberbullying. Our aim here is not simply to point out that mainstream media discourses about new media are wrong, but to work through them and provide some alternative perspectives that can be used in public debates or in practice.

One of the most striking things about mainstream reporting of YouTube is the degree to which these matters of concern conflict with one another. For example, on New Year’s Eve 2007, Australian current affairs programs Today Tonight and A Current Affair both broadcast stories about the most popular YouTube clips of 2007, describing the website as both a repository for ‘amazing, embarrassing, and sometimes downright dangerous moments’ around the world, and a launching platform for ‘many new stars’ (‘YouTube’s Most Watched,’ 2007; ‘Best YouTube Videos,’ 2007). YouTube as good object is a site of wacky, weird, and wonderful user-generated content. Within only a few weeks, however, the same programs returned to business-as-usual stories about cyberbullying on YouTube, framing it as a very bad object indeed – an under-regulated site of lawless, unethical and pathological behavior centered around youth as a risk category. But as YouTube has evolved, so has its role in the cycles of news reporting: from being described as one among a plethora of novel new media applications and a potential site of ordinary self expression, to its prominence as a threat to media dominance and civil order, and, more recently, as a bona fide mainstream, if somewhat unruly and under-regulated, medium in its own right.

Media Panics

In press coverage, YouTube is often used to express familiar anxieties about young people and digital media, especially in relation to the risks, uses and misuses of Internet and mobile phone technologies. These stories are characterized by the particularly modern convergence of ‘trouble-as-fun, fun-as-trouble’ Hebdige (1988: 30) saw in media images of youth in postwar Britain – where young people are represented as an exotic other, at once exuberantly creative and dangerous. Images of youth have been closely associated with ideas about shifts in capitalism and the organization of social structures such as class, wealth distribution, and consumption practices (Murdock and McCron, 1976: 10), and where new media are seen as key disruptive agents, the two are often conflated. Indeed, Kirsten Drotner (2000: 150) argues young people are connected to media by complementary metaphors of newness and change, and because of this, discourses around youth and discourses around new media inevitably become entangled. In the case of YouTube the ‘troubleas-fun, fun-as-trouble’ convergence is further amplified through adult anxieties about an ‘intergenerational [digital] divide’ mobilized through discourses of ‘technological exoticism’ (Herring, 2008), where both YouTube and the masses of ‘youth’ assumed to be its default users, are undisciplined, savage, and at the same time new and exciting (Driscoll and Gregg, 2008). This is apparent even in seemingly positive arguments about young people’s ‘natural’ technological prowess, such as Prensky’s (2001a; 2001b) notion of the ‘digital native.’

This equation of new media platforms like YouTube with ‘youth’ flows through to policy as well. In a recent attempt to encourage young people to be more physically active, the Department for Culture, Media, and Sport in the UK created a website intended to aggregate user-created content about sports performance. The idea seemed to be, “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” – the development was reportedly motivated by the fact ‘the Government can’t get the YouTube generation away from their computer screens’ (Eason, 2008).

Some news stories about YouTube follow the pattern of the ‘moral panic’ – a term which has now passed into everyday language but which in cultural studies is used to describe a specific cycle of co-influence between media representation and social reality around issues of public concern (Cohen, 1972). In the landmark cultural studies text Policing the Crisis, Stuart Hall et al. (1978) analyzed the way mugging in Britain was constructed as a new crime that represented specific threats to society in the context of a particular historical ‘conjuncture’, arguing the focus on this newly acute ‘problem’ worked to obscure what was really a crisis for institutionalized ideological power. As the police and the media targeted ‘mugging,’ the problem was amplified in the public imagination and in reality,1 constituting a ‘moral panic’. Similarly, in media coverage of YouTube, stories exhibiting the characteristics of a moral panic draw on and amplify two interlocking strains of public anxiety: youth and morality on the one hand, and new media and its ‘effects’ on the other. Drotner (1999) describes this double pattern of convergence between new media anxiety and moral anxiety as a ‘media panic’, and demonstrates that it has a long history as an ‘intrinsic and recurrent’ feature of modernity.

Tom Rawstorne and Brad Crouch’s (2006) opinion piece in News Limited paper The Sunday Mail provides a telling example, by turns blaming and absolving both young people and YouTube for deviance. Rawstorne and Crouch (2006) paint YouTube as a video free-for-all, experiencing ‘unchecked growth’ where a sinister space filled with graphic content lies only a few mouse-clicks behind ‘music videos, general entertainment . . . or just people mucking around with a video camera.’ YouTube, they suggest, provides a platform for exhibitionists, beyond the reach of Australian media regulators because of the international character of the Internet. Young people are both agents and victims – responsible for the majority of YouTube’s mundane content (teen-age hijinks and bedroom lip synching), much of its glorified hooliganism (car surfing, happy-slapping, public vandalism, and school-yard brawls), and at risk from exposure to footage of Hitler’s speeches, racist propaganda, gruesome autopsies, dismemberment footage, and videos of mortar attacks in Baghdad.

This media panic convergence is exemplified by stories about ‘cyberbullying’ – the use of digital technologies to bully others, especially by posting humiliating or insulting videos, or by using video to document and celebrate acts of violence. In March 2007, the Victorian Government in Australia blocked access to YouTube from school property in part as a response to the uploading of a video showing twelve boys sexually abusing a 17-year-old Victorian girl (Smith, 2007). Similar calls to restrict access to the website to combat...