{"id":144,"date":"2019-04-26T10:32:29","date_gmt":"2019-04-26T02:32:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/networkconference.netstudies.org\/2019Open\/?p=144"},"modified":"2019-05-02T19:55:16","modified_gmt":"2019-05-02T11:55:16","slug":"the-emergency-of-youtube-as-a-web-2-0-platform-has-cultivated-a-community","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/networkconference.netstudies.org\/2019Open\/2019\/04\/26\/the-emergency-of-youtube-as-a-web-2-0-platform-has-cultivated-a-community\/","title":{"rendered":"The emergency of YouTube as a Web 2.0 platform has cultivated a community"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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The emergence of YouTube as a Web 2.0 platform has cultivated a community of ordinary people becoming celebrities call YouTubers. These YouTubers are often referred to as micro-celebrities (Martinez & Olsson, 2019, p.3). Web 2.0 refers to a movement where websites no longer just publish static content for people to consume. It represents a host of new websites that interacts with its audience by providing features where the user can generate their own content and collaborate with other users. Such websites include blogs, video sharing, wikis and social media sites. One of the most popular Web 2.0 platforms is YouTube which is a video sharing website. This site allows ordinary people to upload and share videos made by themselves free of charge. This platform has given very ordinary people an avenue to express themselves and share their interest with everyone else in the world. Thus, creating a community of YouTubers where everyday people constantly upload video to attract viewers and followers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This thesis will focus on this community and how it came about, paying special attention to the cause of such community and demonstrating with empirical evidence and reference that this community was created by the emergence of YouTube as the leading Web 2.0 platform of the 21th century. We will first give a brief explanation of what it means to use Web 2.0 platforms and then the phenomenon of YouTube. We then briefly go into the history of YouTube and how it came to prominence and the de facto video sharing site that everyone goes to. After which, we will dive deeper into the community that YouTube has created and the so call YouTubers subculture. We will examine what is it like being a YouTuber and what it means to belong to an online community. We then inspect the idea behind the various communities behind YouTube and how they are formed. Next, we investigate the collaborative nature of YouTube where each fan can interact and communicate with the YouTuber via the comment section. This allows the YouTuber direct access to each follower or fanbase that they have which allows them a much closer relationship than any other form of celebrity relationships.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The emergency of Web 2.0 was a gradual phenomenon that span decades beginning around 2002 (Web 2.0, 2019). Its arrival was a culmination of various advances in fields such as network, personal computers and the Internet. But mainly was the maturity of the Internet has reached the next phrase. Web 1.0 mainly consisted of static resources on a webpage, communication was one-way traffic and so it was more a broadcasting model. However, Web 2.0 completely changed this mode of content consumption. In the Web 2.0 era, users are able to interact with each other via web platforms specifically designed to allow users to engage and communicate with each other. Popular Web 2.0 platforms such as blogs, wikis and social media sites all provides functionality for users to upload or leave content about each other. To summarise, Web 2.0 platforms are mainly a participatory culture where users share and collaborate online via a common website. YouTube was one of the early pioneers of the Web 2.0 platforms. It allows any users to upload a short personal video to the site for everyone to watch. This proved to be a huge success and it captured the creativity of everyone around the world. Soon people were uploading and watching videos every minute on the site. According to Clememt Chau, YouTube received 100.9 million unique viewers in January 2009 alone (Chau, 2010). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

YouTube not only gave users the ability to upload and share their videos, it also offered a wide range of features that support the participatory culture which is what drives the Web 2.0 craze around the world. Some of those features include tagging, like, following and most importantly commenting on a video. Not to mention, the content of the video can also be used to generate interactions and collaborations between producers and consumers. For example, a video producer could in the video ask the viewers to leave a comment if they want to see more of such type of videos or they could ask the viewers to write about what they want to see the video producer do next. These are all incentives for everyone involved to interact with each other and form a community around the content they produce. Another reason why YouTube was able to create such a massive community around their users is because the technology behind creating video has advanced dramatically in the past decades. These days, anyone with a smartphone can record and upload videos directly to YouTube and start producing. This low entry to the video sharing network has allowed many people an avenue to promote themselves who otherwise might not have the opportunity to do so.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The power of YouTube extends beyond just a social networking platform. It enables every ordinary people a voice, an avenue, a platform which to express themselves freely without much censorship or regulation. Your content or videos are evaluated by your peers, the very audience that are the same as you. So, this is what builds the community. It is completely self-governed. So, in order for someone to remain relevant and popular within the community they will listen to the comments and adjust their content to cater for the masses. This concept is what mainly drives the community forward. Another major attraction or reason for YouTube\u2019s enormous popularity is that it is made up of almost all user generated content or UGC which means the digital content on the site is produced by ordinary people rather than corporations or professional advertising agencies. The UGC is produced for the general public by the general public. This idea has organically led people to comment and participate in a discussion on various contents produced. Although many users are purely consumers of the digital content, they will however still engage the producer by posting a comment to the video to voice their opinion on the particular content. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, the people who consume as well as produce content are said to be \u201cprosumers\u201d (Waldron, 2013). YouTube is predominantly driven by this ordinary community, in fact, many YouTube users expresses discomfort when they view content created by large corporations in their homepage or section of the media site (Burgess, Green & Jenkins, 2009). This community of ordinary people is what drives the site forward. However, it is worth noting that this community of ordinary people might otherwise not have banded together if it were not for the common interest of sharing videos online. What YouTube has provided to these people is a platform to come together and share a common interest. This platform has provided a place for them to find other like-minded people to share their creative thoughts and imaginations. The rise of YouTube is not a coincidence as it coincides with the rise of the Web 2.0 movement. Along with Web 2.0 comes the trend of the sharing and participatory culture which powered the popularity of YouTube as a sharing platform. With Web 2.0, many individuals are increasing becoming more comfortable with sharing their personal experience or life events online with the public which was not the case couple of decades ago as the Internet was still quite a new concept and many people was hesitating to share anything online. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The participatory culture that YouTube has generated is worth exploring\nfurther as this is the driving force behind the formation of various\ncommunities within the YouTube world. There are a number of elements that\ncontributes to the making of a participatory culture. Firstly, there is a low\nentry barrier which means anyone can quickly and easily participate or\ncontribute to the community. And then there is a culture of contribution\ncounts, for example, every action on the site is recorded and displayed for\nviewers to use a measurement of their popularity or the relevance of their\ncontent. This information is presented instantaneously back to the viewers such\nas number of viewers, number of followers and comments. These indicators provide\ninstant feedback to the content producer in order for them to improve and adapt\ntheir presence accordingly. Moreover, these feedbacks come directly from the\naudience they are trying to reach, and it is unfiltered, so they are getting\nthe most accurate signals from their audience. This cycle of video producing\nand receiving instant feedback is what propels YouTube into such a popular\nparticipatory system. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAnother contributing factor to this culture is the sense of social\nconnection. This plays directly into the concept of the Web 2.0 environment\nwhere users share content and feedback with each other via the various features\noffer by the platform. Users have also created innovative and creative ways to\nconnect and collaborate with other content producers. Some of these methods\ninclude adding an extra segment to the end of a video asking viewers to\nnominate what they want to see next or challenging other YouTubers to something\nthey\u2019ve just achieved. The latter method is extremely popular amongst social\nmedia celebrities in order to drive up views and attract new followers. By\nchallenging other YouTubers, this will quickly become an Internet trend that\nspreads all over the Internet and other social media sites (Chau, 2010).\n\n\n\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nYouTube communities are made up of various groups based on their\ninterests and type of entertainment they offer. For example, one of the biggest\ncategories is vloggers which is short for video bloggers or video loggers.\nThese people will produce frequent videos of their day to day life as something\nlike a video diary. Viewers are attracted to these vloggers purely for their\npersonality and their life experiences. This is a very intimate relationship\nbetween the vlogger and their viewers as they are constantly sharing their life\nwith a large audience, so it is important for them to be careful what they\ndecide to share online.\n\n\n\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With the emergence of the Web 2.0 phenomenon,\nwe have completely changed the way we communicate and collaborate online. Our\nthreshold for privacy has also changed along the way. We find ourselves sharing\na lot more intimate and personal experiences and emotions than ever before. Web\n2.0 platforms has allowed us to reach out to complete strangers and share a\nbrief moment of connection over a common theme. Platform such as YouTube has\nalso allowed strangers to band together to share their interest and passion on\ncommon subject matters. YouTube has provided an easy access for ordinary people\nto express themselves and their creativity publicly with a very low entry\nbarrier. This has created millions of communities all around the world where\neveryday someone can contribute to this amazing culture from the comfort of\ntheir own homes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nDue to the rise of the Web 2.0 environments and the various advances in\ndifferent areas of technology and networks, people are able to connect and\ninteract with each other more simply and quickly than ever before. YouTube has\nultimately capitalised on this movement and have thus created an extremely\nsuccessful Web 2.0 platform utilising some of the most common social networking\nfeatures found on other popular Web 2.0 platforms. Some of those features\ninclude recording viewership of all videos, allow viewers to follow each other\nand most importantly allow viewers to give comments and reply to comments on every\nvideo ever uploaded to YouTube. These features together with the contents in\nthe actual videos have allowed viewers and content producers to connect on a\npersonal level. This in turn created the community around like-minded\nindividuals who shares a common theme or interests. These communities are\nformed organically on the platform without much interference from the YouTube\nplatform itself. All YouTube had to do was to ensure it is providing the most\nintuitive and intelligent way to search for various videos in its repository. Without\nYouTube, ordinary people would not otherwise get the opportunity to showcase\ntheir creativity and talent and reach such a wide audience at next to no cost. \n\n\n\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

References<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

Burgess, J, Green, J & Jenkins H of chapter (2009). How YouTube Matters. YouTube: online video and participatory culture (pp 1-14 & notes pp 144)
http:\/\/link.library.curtin.edu.au\/p?pid=CUR_ALMA51116458870001951<\/a> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Chau, C (2010). YouTube as a participatory culture.
New Directions for Youth Development. p65-74
https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1002\/yd.376<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cocker, H.L & Cronin, J (2017). Charismatic authority and the YouTuber: Unpacking the new cults of personality.
Marketing Theory. Vol. 17(4) 455-472.
https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1177\/1470593117692022<\/a> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hamari, J, Sjoklint, M & Ukkonen, A (2016). The Sharing Economy: Why People Participate in Collaborative Consumption.
Journal of the association for information science and technology, 67(9): 2047-2059.
http:\/\/doi.org\/10.1002\/asi.23552<\/a> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Martinez, C & Olsson, T (2019). Making sense of YouTubers: how Swedish children construct and negotiate the YouTuber Misslisibell as a girl celebrity.
Journal of Children and Media, 13:1, 36-52.
https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1080\/17482798.2018.1517656<\/a> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Waldron, Janice (2013) User-generated content, YouTube and participatory culture on the Web: music learning and teaching in two contrasting online communities.
Music Education Research, 15:3, 257-274.
https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1080\/14613808.2013.772131<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Welbourne, D.J & Grant, W.J (2016). Science communication on YouTube: Factors that affect channel and video popularity.
Public Understanding of Science. Vol. 25(6) 706-718.
https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1177\/0963662515572068<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The emergence of YouTube as a Web 2.0 platform has cultivated a community of ordinary people becoming celebrities call YouTubers. These YouTubers are often referred to as micro-celebrities (Martinez & Olsson, 2019, p.3). Web 2.0 refers to a movement where websites no longer just publish static content for people to consume. It represents a host… Continue reading The emergency of YouTube as a Web 2.0 platform has cultivated a community<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[28,32,30,31,29,7,71,21,64],"class_list":["post-144","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-communities","tag-community","tag-cultureonline","tag-digitalcommunities","tag-socialnetworks","tag-virtualcommunities","tag-social-media","tag-social-networking-sites","tag-social-networks","tag-web-2-0"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/networkconference.netstudies.org\/2019Open\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/144","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/networkconference.netstudies.org\/2019Open\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/networkconference.netstudies.org\/2019Open\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/networkconference.netstudies.org\/2019Open\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/21"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/networkconference.netstudies.org\/2019Open\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=144"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/networkconference.netstudies.org\/2019Open\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/144\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":474,"href":"https:\/\/networkconference.netstudies.org\/2019Open\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/144\/revisions\/474"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/networkconference.netstudies.org\/2019Open\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=144"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/networkconference.netstudies.org\/2019Open\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=144"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/networkconference.netstudies.org\/2019Open\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=144"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}