1. YouTube: Popular Culture and Social Network “Love it or loathe it, YouTube is now part of the mainstream media landscape, and a force to be reckoned with in contemporary popular culture”

2. Accounting for Popularity There are Four Categories that determine a videos popularity: 1. Most Viewed: measures the attention utilized by mainstream media 2. Most Favorited: Video popular enough to be added to users favorite list 3. Most Discussed : videos that generate most comments 4. Most Responded : viewers responded back to video by commenting with a video of their own

3. Content Types across Popularity Category

4. The Two YouTubes YouTube is a space where two categories co-exist and collide, but do not converge: ‘user-created’ and ‘traditional media’

5. Clips and Quotes: Uses of Traditional Media Content Redaction – The concept provides “…an alternative to the discourses of copyright infringement that dog the debates and corporate negotiations around the posting of traditional media content to YouTube” (48).

6. Vaudeville to Vlogs: User- Created Content How much of YouTube is user-created content? >2/3 of contents coded on Most Responded and Most Discussed about 63 and 69 percent. >Vlogs made up nearly 40% of the videos in Most Discussed and over a quarter in Most Responded >The attracting to these videos is somewhat like a talk show…it portrays real life. However, not all blogs are personal. Some are made for the purpose of advertising.

7. YouTube is a Social Network Site “…In YouTube, the video content itself is the main vehicle of communication and the main indication of social clustering” (58). Most subscribed has more “YouTube Stars” and some traditional media in most viewed.

8. YouTube, Inc. as Patron “YouTube, Inc. can bee seen as a ‘patron’ of collective creativity, controlling at least some of the conditions under which creative content is produced, order, and re-represented for the interpretation audience” (60). An art world has been formed through the “‘Network of people whose cooperative activity, organized via their joint knowledge of conventional means of doing things, produces the kind of art works that art world is noted for’” (61). Everyone contributes to cultural production, including viewers without accounts.

9. YouTube as User Innovators YouTube is famously useable = easy. Live video chat ever? No - perceived privacy risks. Instead, one can add annotations to videos. “…in order to operate effectively as a participant in the YouTube community, it is not possible simply to import learned conventions for creative practice, and the cultural competencies required to enact them, form elsewhere” (69).

10. Literacy and the Social Network ‘digital divide’ – the notion of the digital divide was a binary concept based simply on the access or lack of access, to digital technologies like computers and broadband infrastructure. “…helps young people learn to be more ‘critical’ of media messages” (71). “it is more important to acknowledge that the endless stream of ‘kinds’ of literacy indicated something about the current period of social instability around its relationship with media technologies” (71). “Being literate in the context of YouTube, then, means not only being able to create and consume video content, but also being able to comprehend the way YouTube works as a set of technologies and as a social network” (72).

11. Literacy and the Social Network Peter Oakley: Geriatric927 – In his eighties, he became a YouTube star as he learned and mobalized through his participation of YouTube’s social network. http://www.youtube.com/user/geriatric1927#p/u/232/p_YMigZmUuk Lonelygirl15 – vlogging http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZN-Wye4rDE

12. Poking Fun at YouTube Success As always, South Park always manages to poke fun at society and current events. Here, they are making fun of YouTube stars and their success. It questions the true value of YouTube stars and the ‘free- labour’ the put into YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=idZOVqdcqno