DIY Media before and after YouTube

Brisbane.
There's a great line-up of keynotes and plenary speeches starting this second day of the CCi conference, before we get back to paper sessions: we kick off with Convergence Culture guru and serial book launcher Henry Jenkins, then move on to Camilla Cooke who was the driving force behind the online arm of the Australian Labor Party's successful Kevin07 campaign in the last federal election, and follow this with journalist and commentator Margaret Simons speaking on future directions for mainstream journalism. Should be good!

First, though, to Henry Jenkins, whose talk today is also closely related to a new book on YouTube which has been edited by my colleagues Jean Burgess and Josh Green. Henry begins by noting that much that's been written about YouTube assumes that it is unprecedented - but that there is a significant pre-history that should be considered. Sites like YouTube didn't simply construct new communities of participants, for example, but also importantly connected into and harnessed pre-existing communities.

The site is now used very broadly and is appropriated by users from virtually all walks of life, and this rapid take-up is astonishing, but it also shows that so many communities were ready for something like it to come along. It didn't invent these practices; it merely provided a space for them to exist and flourish. Some of this pre-history dates back to around 1997, when many thinkers first considered the likely emergence of digital and desktop video tools into mass use - the potential of a massively multi-channel 'New Hollywood', as Marc Davis called it at the time. Or, put differently, "in the future, everyone will be famous to 15 people", as R.U. Sirius wrote the same year; and also that year, Gareth Branwyn highlighted the future potential of citizen media, and Stephen Duncombe translated zine culture into cyberspace environments.

So, zines and DIY media provide one (usually print-based) precursor to YouTube, and such cultural forms themselves have a rich pre-history that ties into the history of amateur presses; similarly, hand-held tape recorders and video cameras translated such DIY production to the audiovisual environment, often also with more or less overt political messages.

Douglas Rushkoff, also in 1997, described the Web as a place where everyone was broadcasting, yet nobody was receiving; today, this has changed, and YouTube and other sites do manage to aggregate large audiences (and have their content retransmitted through other media forms as well. There has been a move from sticky to spreadable media - from media which attract and hold attention to media which motivate circulation, from concentration to dispersion, from unified consumer experiences to diversified experience, from interactivity to participation, from individual users to social networks, from sales force marketers to grassroots intermediaries as brand advocates, from pull to push, from marketer/consumer distinctions to increased collaborations between them, and from finite channels for communication to localised and temporary networks. In essence, "if it doesn't spread it's dead", Henry says.

Henry also raises cautionary notes, though. Alex Juhasz is concerned that the countercultural and critical impulses traditionally often present in DIY media are dropping out of the picture in YouTube; by contrast, Ethan Zuckerman suggests that any tool which allows for the viral distribution of content has strong inherent political power (and the Anonymous movement is a good example here). Yochai Benkler points to the relative absence of commercial motives in YouTube contributors; instead, they are motivated by a diverse range of impulses, and variously influence one another, blurring the line between contributor communities. Harry Potter fans, for example, are motivated to adopt activist political stances (for example against "the Dark Lord Waldemart").

Jonathan Zittrain points to the potential of user-led innovation, and YouTube adoption (rather than the platform itself) is interesting in this regard. Henry's own work on participatory culture is highly relevant to this discussion, of course - it relies on relatively low barriers for engagement, strong support for sharing, informal mentorship, a belief that contributions matter, and a care about other's opinion of self and work. Participating in this sense also opens participants' eyes to a more critical view on these practices themselves. This, too, has a long history, which can be seen in the appropriation of fictional characters in child's play, for example.

Questions in long-established DIY media communities sometimes centre around whether adopting a generic content sharing platform is a good idea; it may hide and deny the long pre-history of content creation in such communities which had already existed before coming to YouTube. Some communities of vidders (DIY fan video makers following a textual poaching approach) favour the slightly less public/generic videosharing site iMeem for that reason, for example.

Some of this is also related to concerns about intellectual property implications - vidders (who use copyright material as a source for their DIY media) expose themselves to IP persecution by copyright holders, and some shy away from sharing their work through major videosharing sites for that reason (while others see this as a way to create greater awareness of their practices, and to generate support in case of legal action). There is a clash here between the gift economy of DIY media communities and the perception that mainstream videosharing sites like YouTube are still mainly part of commodity culture. Henry points to Lewis Hyde's book The Gift in this context, as a way of understanding the role of gift giving and receiving, and also highlights the Geek Manifesto as a statement of what gifted media content means to the communities which work with it.

Some communities are in the process of building their own infrastructure in order to have a platform which is better suited to their own practices. This is an issue for fan culture groups, but also for politically motivated groups (tracking human rights abuses through user-generated media, for example, with some inspiration drawn from the Rodney King case). Against this, there is the rise of fake grassroots media being created to counter the effects of bona fide DIY media - humbug media such as "Al Gore's Penguin Army", a faux-DIY video clip against An Inconvenient Truth which was created professionally by an ad agency with ties to major industry.

Many collectors who used to create value by hoarding their material are now creating value by sharing them through YouTube and similar sites; this is also happening for homemade pornographic content, but here, DIY videomakers are excluded by YouTube's terms of service and have set up their own spin-off, PornTube. So, there is a question of how representative YouTube is of the diversity of amateur content; Henry suggests that it is important to ask "what's not there?", and answers to these questions can best be found by looking at the pre-history of DIY content creation and sharing, and by tracing the extent to which the creators of such content have moved to the YouTube platform.

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