Content. A user’s attitude and behavior are normally affected by content. Entertainment content captures one’s attention by providing pleasure. People are free to make choices upon content, such as YouTube for an example.
Culture. Culture is reflected by videos, and can even be formed by video streaming sites. These mediums also affect media consumption behavior; resulting in users becoming more addictive to videos (by spending a longer amount of time, or checking updates more regularly). Culture and communication and culture can often be intertwined. People can and will sometimes demonstrate different reactions towards the same content, based on their backgrounds and their culture.
Therefore, both content and culture matter.
Live Streaming. Streaming video in live networks is an emerging culture. Periscope, is a live video streaming app for Android and iOS. This app is acquired by Twitter and was launched in 2015. It allows you to watch and broadcast live video from all across the globe. Mobile technologies emerge with various digital media practices. Mobility holds fewer restrictions on technicalities as well as geographical location. In an article researches investigated how online blocking and bypassing are shaping access to digital video in different parts of the world, and explore what this means for screen culture today. These researchers claimed that Periscope is frequently proclaimed as opening new doors for global communication and content sharing, but legal and corporate pressure may potentially hamper its development to some extent. Video streaming sites as a whole, exert gratification, participatory and immersion. This participatory type culture challenges power, and comments by other people provide a new source of information.
YouTube. YouTube is one of the most well-known and widely discussed sites of participatory media in the contemporary online environment. It is a mass-popular platform for user-created video. YouTube relates to wider transformations in culture, society, and the economy. Henry Jenkins argues that value is primarily generated via ‘spreadability. Through reuse, reworking and redistribution, spreadable media content ‘gains greater resonance in the culture, taking on new meanings, finding new audiences, attracting new markets, and generating new values. If using this logic, then any particular video produces cultural value to the extent that it acts as a hub for further creative activity by a wide range of participants in this social network. If we rethink the concept of ‘viral video’ then it may contribute to a better understanding of how the cultures emerging around user created video are shaping the dynamics of contemporary popular culture.
Van Dijck proposes a multidisciplinary approach to user agency. He states that the era of commercialized user-generated content is where user activity is heavily mediated by high-tech algorithms and data mining firms. Exemplifying this transformation is the changing position of YouTube, a user-generated content site that evolved from a small start-up driven by user communities into a commercial platform that is now and important node in an evolving system of media firms dominated by Google. “Cultural production can no longer be theorized exclusively in terms of industry or social stratification of consumers, as the amplified efficacy of media technologies is closely intertwined with the rise of global media constellations” (Hesmondhalgh, 2006). User agency in the age of digital media can no longer be assessed from one exclusive disciplinary angle as the social, cultural, economic, technological and legal aspects of user-generated content sites are inseparably entwined.
Gentzkow. Matthew Gentzkow analysis states that television has generally been “bad” socio-politically speaking. Although television easily provided politics with a new medium to present information, it also gave the audience the opportunity to consume their leisure time; thus, him deeming it as “bad”. Television may not work in the favor of political information, but it is a solution for distant learning. Other researchers say that entertainment is the nature of human, and that we cannot define television as “good” or “bad”. Everything always has two sides, and the way in which people use it and what they use it for always varies. Both YouTube and live streaming can be categorized; and based off the content, culture, and person, it can be either good or bad, just as television, newspapers, and other media platforms.
References
Burgess, J. (2014). ‘All Your Chocolate Rain Are Belong To Us?’Viral Video, You Tube and the Dynamics of Participatory Culture. In Art in the Global Present (pp. 86-96). UTSePress.
Gentzkow, M. (2006). Television and voter turnout. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 121(3), 931-972.
Lobato, R., Meese, J., Rugg, A., & Burroughs, B. (2016). Geoblocking and Video Culture.
Van Dijck, J. (2009). Users like you? Theorizing agency in user-generated content. Media, culture & society, 31(1), 41-58.