Introduction
YouTube global network is t hone that makes people addicted and willing to keep up to this participatory culture. Undoubtedly, people are getting more and more dependent on this culture since it gained recognition among the larger part of the planet for its diversity, information awareness, and the new mean of media sphere. The user friendly YouTube is what accompanies many adolescences and middle aged amateurs and professional video makers every day. However, YouTube is not the pioneer in sub-cultures’ emergence, it was preceded by Do-It-Yourself’ cultures of all kinds that most likely forced the evolution of mass media usage as we observe it today. However, YouTube today is a network that has to be adopted well beyond a mere social network substance; it needs to be put in the larger historical content. Yochai Benkler in his The Wealth of Networks framed that YouTube is ‘a space where commercial, amateur, nonprofit, governmental, educational, and activist content co-exists and interacts in ever more complex ways’. Indeed, YouTube is the site where grassroots media and corporate media converge. Moreover, it can be considered to be an implementation of democracy, for it displays ‘anti-corporate outlets, greater diversity among participants, more debate about whose work gets seen and how it is valued.’ (Jenkins, 2009). Therefore, this essay will enlarge upon the video When the Levees Broke by Spike Lee submitted to YouTube, namely the analysis of participation group and responses to the video will be analyzed.
“Internet has been designed to serve both as a means of establishing a logical network and as a means of subsuming existing heterogeneous networks while allowing those networks to function independently” (Zittrain, p. 3) Nevertheless, YouTube is not a mere laying out of the information, neither can it be called a noninterference network ; it is rather a new way of linking people, the way that has never been used before,whereas media is something way different: ‘Journalism under any circumstances is a competitive business and the timely report has a preemptive power to shape opinion.’ (Horne, p. XVI). It is significant how people from various cultures are able of being amused by the same video and have fun mocking a certain song of completely unfamiliar language in front of million web cameras. Remarkably, the videos on YouTube make people collaborate across time and space in order to create mutual works, and this is what makes YouTube outstanding – the distance and space shorten.
Emergence of When the Levees Broke on YouTube
Though YouTube has millions of videos uploaded, it has only about six groups that all videos can be put into. This video can deservedly be called a politically contradictory video, which is revealing the outrageous facts of the current President’s office. Although this is more of a full-length film, still it was laid out on YouTube in order to be available to great masses of people, though being screened before on TV. This, undoubtedly, covers the thought that YouTube is a large broadcast that helps people convey their message to others and get feedbacks in order to see others diverse opinions.
The video is recognized as Spike Lee’s the most outstanding work that goes to the deep root of the problem. First of all the beginning of the video emphasizes the changes New Orleans had gone through. Namely, showing the black-and-white scenes of a nice town in the past and then the colorful festivals holding in the city with smiling faces make you think how pathetic this all looks in comparison with the shots showed in between those peaceful sights: the aftermath of the hurricane. Subsequently, it is evident that the entire introduction of the requiem foresees what will be next, though yet incomprehensible how deep and unbelievably unexpected the Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath will be revealed. Of course, when watching the video a person subconsciously comes to the conclusion of complete ignorance of government to the disaster. Whether it happened due to racial, gender, or class reasons, every average American feels sympathetic to the utmost because those victims were just people who needed help desperately despite their skin color. Needless to say that a Spike Lee film reveals an unexpected episodes of the Bush governing times, besides, some of them really stun and arouse nothing but a mere feeling of anger. In order to be verbose, it is necessary to present some scenes the movie showed. For examples, the doorplate saying ‘Dead body inside, help!’ and ‘Driving winds had torn doors off houses bent trailers like horseshoes…’ (Brinkley, p.3) make a great impression of how people were made to be locked within the situation with no help and no possible hope for rescuing. So, while When the Levees Broke explicitly showed the tragedy that occurred in the United States, it also represented a completely different view of grassroots media of the United States that was opposite to the one of corporate media. This, of course, makes YouTube prove that democracy is likely to inherit in many different countries because the citizenship of a video submitter does not count while you upload videos to the world wide resource. Besides, YouTube contributed greatly to the awareness of people about the tragedy. Even if the Ammy Award Winning movie was not showed on TV, YouTube would have carried out its democratic duty. Since May 17th 2008 each part of the video has been watched more than 50 thousand times. More than 500 people added it as favorite video, more than 200 left commentaries, and on October of 2009 YouTube video was watched on the cellphone, which makes it clear that YouTube entered our lives completely.
Response to the Video by YouTube Community
It is important that videos are being commented every time they get on YouTube by various kinds of YouTube communities, hence a certain video receives plenty of feedbacks from people of different interests. This is a great opportunity for contemporary youth to express themselves, as the enhancement of technologies, on the contrary, refuse to enable people for freedom of usage of cyber functions: “Although new media technologies appear to enable new freedoms, for consumers
of pop music, the transition to downloadable media actually restricted uses they had previously enjoyed with earlier formats.” (Driscoll, p. 55) “Many companies use “stickiness” as a key measure of success, an idea that holds onto the perceived value of aggregating eyeballs to a particular location.” (Jenkins, p.3 )Therefore, the video When the Levees Broke is a certain success according to Jenkins. Although the responses to the video were maninly originated due to the home assignment require by teachers, it is remarkable that students felt necessary to upload their video responses to When the Levees Broke in order to broadcast themselves. YouTube is now becoming an essential part of every youngster in terms of expressing his/her thoughts and conveying those to the audience for further consideration by millions. So, there are more than twenty video histories – video responses to the movie – of young people who watched the video. Remarkably, it entailed many people’s emotions appear on YouTube as they were – indignation, disapproval of the political order, frustration, etc.
Reported by other Online Communities
Moreover, the commentaries below the uploaded piece on YouTube were not the only accompanies of the masterpiece by Spike Lee. People started posting their responses and the video itself in their personal blogs, since the issue touched upon was very burning and is debatable still. When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts got its page on Wikipedia which is considered very trustworthy and acknowledged. Subsequently, the page on Facebook was created, that also entailed commentaries left. The latter truly destroys a myth of Bush being a good president for those who had it, and supports the true facts that are likely to be posted on web, though well-known by many people, such as per Katrina accident: ‘However, instead of sympathy and support, some conservative pundits have sought to link the suffering caused by Katrina to the lack of patriarchal Black family structures, which they argue could have helped individuals survive in the crisis.’ (Ransby, p.215)The video is a wonderful resolution of what it is called to be democracy within the state. However, it is interesting within the theme of democratic society that many people expressed their opinion about the director as arrogant, antagonistic discriminator but this did not make the movie less famous
Conclusion
YouTube community is a completely innovative way of linking people all over the world. Moreover, let me claim that ultimately YouTube will serve as a huge communities and cultures’ linking program. It is hard to make predictions on the development of mass media and public sphere today, though YouTube might serve as a single-truth environment in future. Since YouTube videos are taken up by people so eagerly today, it can be said that this site is going to start out a latent revolution in mass media production, although it seems like major content is entertaining.
Works Cited
Benkler, Y. The Wealth of Networks How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. 2006. Print.
Brinkley, D. The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast. New York, NY: Harper Collins Publishers. 2006, Print.
Driscoll, K. The Hip Hop Approach, Stepping Your Game Up: Technical Innovation Among Young People of Color in Hip-Hop. MIT Master’s thesis. 2009.
Horne, J. Breach of Faith: Hurricane Katrina and the Near Death of a Great American City. New York, NY: the Random House Publishing Group. 2008, Print.
Jenkins, H. What Happened Before YouTube in Joshua Green and Jean Burgess, YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture. New York: Polity, 2009.
Jenkins, H., Ford, S. et al. Spreadable Media: Creating Value in a Networked Society. New York: New York University Press. Chapters 1-2, 6.
Jonathan Zittrain, “The Generative Internet,” Harvard Law Review 119.7, 2006.
Ransby, B Katrina, Black Women, and the Deadly Discourse on Black Poverty in America. (2006). Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race, 3, pp 215-222.