Agency and Controversy in the YouTube Community

Abstract

This chapter addresses the practices of and conflicts among the core group of particularly active and sociable YouTube users who operated with a self-understanding of themselves as a ‘community’, especially in the first few years of the platform. The chapter argues that despite its internal antagonisms, it is this community of practice that provides the environment in which new literacies, new cultural forms, and new social practices – situated in and appropriate to the culture of user-created online video – were originated, adopted and retained. In order to operate effectively as a participant in the YouTube community, it is not possible to simply import learned conventions for creative practice, entertainment, or audience-building, from elsewhere. Success and cultural innovation in the early years of the platform were achieved by exploiting site-specific forms of ‘vernacular expertise’. Collectively, these particularly invested and knowledgeable users mobilised their insider knowledge in struggles over the culture of YouTube, contributing in a lasting way to its distinctive cultural forms and business logics.

This chapter is an updated and revised version of Burgess, Jean E. and Green, Joshua B. (2008) Agency and Controversy in the YouTube Community. In IR 9.0: Rethinking Communities, Rethinking Place – Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) conference, 15–18 October 2008, IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark. Portions of the original conference paper also appear in Burgess, J. & Green, J. (2009). YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture. Cambridge: Polity Press.