Low Level Purview:
“When are the Resources Organized? How or by Whom, or by What?”
We are now approaching the last two design questions for exploration. The two last questions pose two points of inquiry: “When are YouTube resources being organized?” and “Who is organizing the resources?” Unlike the second design question's subjectivity, this duo of questions can be answered objectively with information drawn from YouTube and other scholarship.
YouTube is grounded on a participatory culture promoting user connectivity and interaction. YouTube fosters, what Glushko calls, a “folksonomy” or “crowd source” where users are agents of the explicit labeling of their media (2014). Users' tags and labels offer meta-data of their video, communicating various features of the video such as its subject matter and purpose. Also, perhaps even more importantly, YouTube users tag and label their videos in order to attract other users to view and share their media. After videos have been tagged, videos are further organized with the use of rating mechanisms and bookmarking to promote the videos spread (“YouTube Statistics” 2014).
Along with the interconnectedness that YouTube nurtures among its users, is the volume of videos uploaded to the site. With the size of uploads and the community-oriented nature of the site in mind, Glushko cites that YouTube prioritizes its focus on the aggregation, interpretation, and response to the videos generated by making users organize their own uploads. The amount of video currently being downloaded is unprecedented: by the time you have finished reading this paragraph about 100 hours of video has been uploaded to YouTube (“YouTube Statistics” 2014).
YouTube is grounded on a participatory culture promoting user connectivity and interaction. YouTube fosters, what Glushko calls, a “folksonomy” or “crowd source” where users are agents of the explicit labeling of their media (2014). Users' tags and labels offer meta-data of their video, communicating various features of the video such as its subject matter and purpose. Also, perhaps even more importantly, YouTube users tag and label their videos in order to attract other users to view and share their media. After videos have been tagged, videos are further organized with the use of rating mechanisms and bookmarking to promote the videos spread (“YouTube Statistics” 2014).
Along with the interconnectedness that YouTube nurtures among its users, is the volume of videos uploaded to the site. With the size of uploads and the community-oriented nature of the site in mind, Glushko cites that YouTube prioritizes its focus on the aggregation, interpretation, and response to the videos generated by making users organize their own uploads. The amount of video currently being downloaded is unprecedented: by the time you have finished reading this paragraph about 100 hours of video has been uploaded to YouTube (“YouTube Statistics” 2014).
While this analysis could be expanded in terms of scope and depth, the analysis outlined provides a developed conceptualization of YouTube and its organizational functionality. Now that the analysis has explored each design question, moving from a high level to a low level exploration, the theory will now be contextualized in praxis. The next section draws connections between the information derived from the analysis and ways it can be integrated in the process of composing multimodal works. The upcoming section will be framed with an assignment I gave to my first-year composition students. The assignment was to create YouTube “viral” video clips.