Conclusion
In the online debate about the OPRAH channel, a YouTube Community becomes visible. Through their text comments and video responses YouTube users define their platform as a creative alternative to television, a place for user-generated content and as community with norms and rules of behavior that should acknowledged and followed. Despite, or perhaps because of, the reality of broadcasting corporations on YouTube, the grassroots origins of YouTube are again much emphasized. In many instances Oprah is seen as a threat to YouTube’s identity, an infiltration or corporatism and of a ‘foreign’ medium, and faced with this threat, the otherwise fragmented YouTube unites to defend their position on YouTube. The revolution where renetto and Paperlilies steer towards is not likely to happen because of the diversity of users online, but the popular and self-referential videos of prominent members do help to create the experience of community.
The main objective of the collective project of this special issue on YouTube, is to explore and map the different communities that emerge or are supported on YouTube. Most of the contributions focus on communities that have their basis in the offline world or that are shaped by external discourses. Wolters has shown a YouTube serves a community which could not find an effective platform offline. Schepers concludes that flash mob communities are mainly shaped by discourse originating outside and Kaltenbrunner makes clear that art communities on YouTube in many ways refer to the conventions of the art establishment.
This article however shows that YouTube is not only a platform for multiple communities and a channel for outside discourses, but that it also has its own discourse. YouTube is also the object of community building itself.
From a more literary perspective, Lamerichs has already shown that there is a group of videos which are whose basis is not only grounded in a source-text (for instance Star Wars) but also in YouTube itself. With this article I would like to add that this self-referential discourse is (temporarily) strengthened when another discourse, that of corporate broadcasting television, becomes part of the YouTube application. Though corporations may fail to create a brand community on YouTube (Cornips), they may support a community of resistance.
Wilbur (2002, p. 55) once wrote: ‘We should be prepared to find community under a wide variety of circumstances, in a broad range of environments, and intermingled with any number of elements that seemed to work against the development of ‘sufficient human feeling’”. As is made clear in the introduction chapter, YouTube is a very large and highly decentralised platform and perhaps an unlikely place to look for an overarching community, yet as we have seen there is large group of videos that construct a common YouTube identity. Future research should therefore not ignore communities that have roots in the identity of a web application rather than in external environments.
Furthermore it would be interesting to investigate how a community based on the identity of the web application, develops over time. How stable is the YouTube identity? This article has focussed on the Oprah affair which only stretches over a period of weeks. And as this website is YouTube and not O-Tube, dependent on the participation of its changing users, the its development is difficult to predict.
Brouwers, Janneke.
YouTube vs. O-Tube: Negotiating a YouTube Identity.
Cultures of Arts, Science and Technology 1, no. 1 (30 May 2008).
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