YouTube and Video Exchange

Attributes and Relationships

YouTube's technical tools have transformed this online, video-based social network into an icon of the Internet's new architecture, Web 2.0. In June 2010, the company's fact sheet summed up YouTube's technical features as including video embedding, public or private videos, subscriptions, recording from Webcams, and TestTube. YouTube permits its users to exercise control over content, raising a community of “prosumers,” an amalgamation of a new breed of users who both produce and consume content. Not only are they bent on creating and developing videos but also sharing the fruits of their labor with a larger virtual community.

YouTube's communication features, particularly commenting on and posting content, cement the social ties connecting the various nodes of the network. The expansion of this community has increasingly hinged on introducing familiar social networking features to the site. Social networking tools, such as “friending,” tagging, capable of creating and storing personal information, enhances the level of content sharing among community members and users from other social networking sites and the larger world of the Web.

In one of the first network analysis studies seeking to unveil the virtual community behind YouTube, researchers Rodrygo Santos, Bruno Rocha, Cristiano Rezende, and Antonio Loureiro analyzed the site's organizational properties, as well as the social relationships among its users and among its videos. In this network analysis, the author's study examined the attributes and various relationships among the nodes (users and videos) of the YouTube social network. The network analysis revealed that most logged users of YouTube watch only a small number of videos, while a small minority of users intensively use the video service. Further, YouTube users' reputation is strongly connected to the number of subscribers users have. The study also suggests that the more controversial a video, the more user comments it is [Page 973]likely to generate. YouTube networks are strongly based on friendship, subscription, relatedness, and favoring. This mapping of the social network underscores how YouTube's technical features and attributes permeate the architecture of the virtual community it enables.

The bottom-up structure of content creation and video information exchange in YouTube facilitates interaction and bonding among the various members of its virtual social network, enhancing a tenacious drive toward user participation. As a centerpiece of its online existence, the YouTube community prizes this participation—the creation and exchange of amateur and professional videos alike—as it fosters a society-wide participatory culture. In their publication YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture, Joshua Green and Jean Burgess observe how the site has ushered a larger societal shift in attitude toward the structure of authority and power. Participatory culture challenges the nature of cultural production and consumption, historically dominated by large corporations. It redefines what is popular and cool, with most responded/commented categories, without abiding by traditional standards of mass markets and mass consumers. While the bottom-up technical structure makes this participatory culture possible, questions about how YouTube fits into its parent company's strategy to dominate the information economy deserve more scholarly scrutiny.

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