creativity/machine

In addition to a lot of predictable Banksy spottings, there are some interesting images in this Flickr group, including this one:

Group description:

This group is interested in how people use, abuse and subvert ‘public’ spaces. Now that we lead sedentary indoor lives, public spaces are often neglected or strictly controlled and regulated.
We are interested in how public spaces can be used for ‘unexpected’ purposes other than their design or how that are ’supposed’ to.

I’ve been playing around with various twitter mashups, tools and toys lately, and I just had to give this one a quick mention.

Unusually for me, I am about to talk about some art…

Gregory Chatonsky’s work L’attente/The Waiting (warning, Flash-heavy), part of a series called “Flußgeist”, the “spirit of the flow”, mashes up twitter posts with Flickr photos whose tags match keywords in the tweets, along with an ambient soundtrack (pulling in data from Odeo) and video footage of urban pedestrians waiting at the lights, lost in thought, walking, or just standing around.

The overall effect is quiet and beautiful, of course, and it’s a nice comment on the ambient intimacy we are learning to associate with twitter. I think it is also doing something in the way of reflecting on the very different ways of being together-but-apart that the experience of sharing space in cities brings with it - the intimacy of strangers, maybe; it invites us to consider the slight frisson associated with observing the ‘private’ moments of others in a ‘public’ place. The ‘private’ (or personal) and the ‘public’ are of course precisely what is being reconfigured through social media. More importantly, as Melissa points out, the uses and meanings of particular social media platforms, and the social practices that are associated with them, are emerging via the mass popularisation - the large-scale takeup - of social media, and not as a simple consequence of the invention of new things - platforms, widgets and gizmos. That’s why we won’t simply see ‘migrations’ from one platform to another; facebook is not myspace is not twitter.

Which is a long-winded way of saying that we can’t know what Twitter, as a relatively open and underdetermined platform, but one that is at this stage used by a relatively ‘niche’ population, will turn out to be ‘for’ in the end.

And a note to self more than anything: the mashing up of video footage from the street with twitter posts also reminds me to be very careful about how I interpret things. I will try with renewed vigour to remember how cheap and unproductive it is to simply import categories and metaphors derived from existing cultural and social theories developed to understand social life in modernity (the ‘flaneur’, the ‘voyeur’, the ‘narcissist’) to think about the relationships and practices that emerge via the collective use of each new social media platform. We have to look as hard as we can at what really seems to be going on, as ‘new’ practices emerge and ‘old’ ones are remediated.

So Flickr finally ended the years of rumour-mongering and actually rolled out video. I was interested to see the way the official announcement carefully positioned the purposes of video on Flickr within the company’s (tasteful, cosmopolitan, playfully grown-up) brand identity, and its focus on self-created content:

we thought long and hard about how video would complement the flickrverse. If you’ve memorized the Community Guidelines, you know that Flickr is all about sharing photos that you yourself have taken. Video will be no different and so what quickly bubbled up was the idea of “long photos,” of capturing slices of life to share. [emphasis added, which possibly comes across as me being a bit pedantic]

They even give a carefully diverse range of quotidian examples–covering cats, places, events and people, of course.

There’s some really interesting protest going on within the sections of the Flickr community who are really invested in capital-P Photography, including this well-populated anti-video group, with some surprisingly hostile comments about the company. A lot of people seem to be worried that somehow the introduction of video will directly cause a ‘flood’ of banal, crass, and unlovely content, and will turn a photography-oriented community into ‘just another YouTube’. The controversy is tremendously interesting to me in its own right, of course–there’s technological determinism combined with symbolic boundary work and a fair amount of amnesia about Flickr’s mundane origins–at least as far as I remember there was a lot more emphasis on lifelogging using the (then) newly available camera phone than there was on digital camera arms races, fine art techniques, and so on.

So, controversy aside, how is it turning out? What do you really get when you start with a mature online social network with social and cultural norms increasingly organised around ‘quality’ content, introduce the ability to upload very short video clips (but only to Pro members), presented within the often carefully cultivated ‘photo streams’ of individual users, combined with a way of accounting for value that takes into account far more than the number of people who been tempted (or tricked) into viewing a particular piece of content?

I’m sure there will be some silliness, and unlike the Fotografrs who are protesting the move, I also really hope there will be some very cute cat videos.

But there will also be lovely slideshows designed to curate and exhibit small sets of photographic images, like this beautiful video–which is much more than a slideshow–by Timo Arnall [thanks anne, again]

And, I will bet, increasingly elegant innovations on observational and personal photography like what Photojojo is calling the ‘long portrait’:

The thing about the best portraits is how they capture the essence of a person.

Maybe the wrinkles on their hands, or the expression in their eyes, tell you about the life they’ve had.

So what if you had 30 seconds to capture that person, instead of a nanosecond shutter-click? And what if the person could talk? Whoa. Crazy, we know. We call it a long portrait.

Which sounds a lot like a micro digital story: a focus on the personal and first-person, within elegant aesthetic constraints, done with attention to detail and respect for the co-creator. Photojojo even links to the interviewing guide on the StoryCorps website to assist newbie micro-documentarists in learning the art of capturing these snapshots of individual human lives.

I really think the idea of the ‘long portrait’ is quite brilliant.

Aside from that, the collective shaping of the meanings and uses of video within Flickr’s existing community of practice is going to be extremely interesting to watch.

[cross-posted at Propagating Media]

So, Oprah has her own YouTube channel. I was very interested to see how the user community would respond to Oprah’s debut on the site, given the stirrings of discontent I’d been detecting recently around a perceived ‘dumbing down’, sensationalising or mainstreaming of the content that makes it to the top of the YouTube rankings lately.

There’s a good roundup of the discussion on the excellent blog YouTube Stars, including a whole bunch of videos responding to this development:

The YouTube community has reacted with ambivalence to Oprah’s new channel. Some think it will bring new viewers for everyone’s videos. But others object to Oprah’s apparent “one-way conversation” - she seems to want to advertise to us without accepting feedback. It has also been lamented that the “golden age” of YouTube is over. With the corporate accounts racking up lots of viewers, its hard to get on the most discussed or most viewed lists without resorting to histrionics and sensationalism. YouTube seemed more like a community of videomakers before “partners” came on to advertise to us. But, all this was inevitable. YouTube was spending millions on the computer power and bandwidth necessary to provide this free service to the uploaders and viewers of the thousands of new videos posted weekly on the site.

I’m not sure this trend really is inevitable. When I spoke to the Convergence Culture Consortium partners at MIT earlier in the year, I tried to argue that it would be a mistake to think of user-created content as a placeholder for ‘real’ (quality, industry-produced) content. I argued that we now have sufficient evidence to say that ‘ordinary’ people are interested in each others’ content, and that it is the social practices around content creation, and not just the ‘content’ itself, that actually cause the platforms designed around user-created content to grow in a sustainable way. It is the collective activities of those users who are engaged in both creative practice and social interaction, wherever they are along the ‘continuum of participation’, that produces the value of each network, and that is what in turn creates loyalty.

At the time, I argued that Flickr was a model of best practice in this regard - cultivating loyalty among its users, deliberately instilling (and if necessary enforcing) social and creative norms designed to maintain the integrity of the community even as it scaled, preserving and respecting the rights of its users, and being selective about who it partners with. I’m not saying there hasn’t been any trouble in Flickr-land, but I still stand by the ‘best practice’ idea, even if it’s “the best you can do if you’re owned by a big company like Yahoo!”.

Going back to the matter at hand, it doesn’t surprise me that the core participants in the YouTube community - the YouTubers - might see the entrance of the Oprah brand, and the way YouTube has responded to it, as something of a disappointment. As many of the comments by dissenting YouTubers demonstrate, the complaint is not really about sharing the space with the mainstream media, it’s about the way that attempts on the behalf of the mainstream media and YouTube itself to exploit the scale of the network are causing ecological changes to YouTube’s economy of attention, so that it is becoming harder and harder to find quality grassroots or niche content. That’s the perception, anyway - it’s hard to say for certain without doing some tracking over time.

Another point made by several YouTube commenters is that Oprah is importing the celebrity + control mentality of big media into the social media space (e.g. by disallowing or filtering comments) and therefore ignoring the cultural norms that have developed over the life of the network; a situation only exacerbated by YouTube’s practice of featuring and partnering with mainstream media companies and celebrities who haven’t done the ‘hard yards’ in the subculture. See this vlog entry by Hughsnews for an example of this kind of critique:

Star vlogger Renato (aka Paul Robinett) is having none of it, suggesting that the lead users might know better than the company what this thing called YouTube is actually for:

Renato may have a point, despite the whiff of sour grapes in the air, and despite the fact that as a YouTube partner himself he is viewed by some users as a bit of a sell-out.

But then last week I noticed this announcement on the official YouTube blog:

Today marks the first day of a new project aimed at better understanding the needs and wants of our users. The “YouTube Community Council” consists of a handful of volunteers (who will rotate every six months) eager to share their opinions about the site and the community with us on a consistent basis. They’re kicking off their tenure by visiting us in San Bruno over the next few days, giving feedback directly to the team that makes it happen behind the scenes.

There’s also a video that introduces the team and a link to their channels. I’ll be interested to see how this goes - and I’d love to know what other community engagement/management strategies are in place already, because on its own this initiative looks like a case of too little, too late.

One of the things I find most interesting about the current proliferation and extensive uptake of various ’social media’ technologies, from RSS readers, to del.icio.us, facebook and twitter as well as weblogs themselves, is the decentralising effect that these technologies are having the ‘online presence’ of individuals, at the same time as these technologies are being adopted at scale. Put simply, there are more of us online, in more places. But is more really more?

When I first started this blog around four years ago, it was used as a bucket for just about everything I did online - most of which was somehow work-related. These days my day-to-day bookmarks are in one place, my photos in another, lyrical one-liners about the weather and anxious rants about procrastination somewhere else, and personal announcements, birthday greetings and most other online phatic communication somewhere else entirely. If I have the time, headspace and confidence, I blog about my academic work/life here or at the other research blog I share with my colleagues (which is looking slightly neglected at the moment, I’m afraid). And it should hardly need saying, but of course all of that adds up to only a very partial and (sometimes) controlled version of my professional and/or personal identity.

One thing that has struck me lately, is that this hyper-distributed version of online presence, connecting us in different ways to a variety of colleagues, professional, personal, and online acquaintances, and close friends, couldn’t be further from the 1990s personal home page - a one-stop shop that often seemed to incorporate everything from a CV to cat photos, holiday snaps, essays and online diary. It’s important to note that, given the comparative unevenness of internet access, use and participation at the time, the personal home page was a form of cultural production never adopted at anything like the current scale of blogs and SNS profiles.*

At the same time, some discussion of blogrolls has come up at Mel’s blog. I have been thinking about that this morning in terms of the increasingly distributed quality of ‘online presence’, and the uses of social media relative to technological shifts, that I mentioned above.

I have a feeling that blogrolls probably have an important antecedent in a standard element of the personal home page genre - the ‘links’ page, which you could see as a user-led innovation that preceded web directories and sophisticated search engines. These links lists (and, later, webrings) were used to create a neighbourhood of similar, favourite, or somehow relevant webpages - back in the days when it might have seemed feasible to collect links to most of, or even the most relevant, webpages on your chosen topic!

Similarly, I never thought of my own blogroll as any kind of performance of who was ‘in’ or ‘out’ of my social circle - it was a list of blogs that I had found to be of relevance to one or more of the topics I was writing about (new media studies, amateur cultural production, music, cultural studies), or blogs that I particularly enjoyed reading, or, sometimes, that were produced by people I knew. It was one among several methods of creating and contributing to a textual neighbourhood. Implicitly, the act of adding someone’s blog to your own list was a low-key signal to that blog’s author that you were reading them. I think using the blogroll in that way is simply collegial behaviour. But now that there are far too many blogs on any given topic to be accommodated in any one list, the question is what to do about the problem of sheer scale?

Also, these days I access most of the blogs I read via RSS, and catch the traces of their authors’ web browsing via their del.icio.us links or links within individual blog entries, while visiting the actual URLs of individual blogs only rarely, and then mainly to view or contribute comments. I know that 80% or so of my readers do the same; so is anyone actually using anyone else’s blogrolls anymore anyway? Should we ditch the blogroll entirely? I don’t know about that. I’m happy to let mine just sit there in the sidebar, deleting the links that are clearly defunct or too far removed from my current interests, and adding new ones now and then.

Much of what has been most valued about blogs proceeds from the idea that blog authors make the effort to link widely and specifically to other blogs that deal with similar topics or issues. I’m not sure that this interlinking within blog entries is occurring nearly so much as it used to. If I’m right about that (and I’m happy to be corrected) perhaps the lack of a strong explicit interest among bloggers in pursuing the idea of blogging as a networked practice is due to the obsessive characterisation of blogs as a kind of ‘personal publishing’ (or at most ‘journalism’), and the continued reification of ‘authorship’, rather than as a conversational or networked form of cultural production. And in fact, perhaps the technological architectures and relatively stable cultural norms around blogging simply shape it towards individualistic and self-referential forms of textual production. I believe many in the LiveJournal community would agree. In which case, perhaps the increased ‘distribution’ of online presence is a good thing.

In any case, it’s clear that there are continuing struggles and negotiations within every blog, and within discourses about blogging, about the extent to which blogging is a platform that supports the individualistic privileges (and responsibilities) of authorship, and the extent to which it supports the propagation of collective cultural practice and conversation.

*By the way, the Google algorithm makes it almost impossible to find an example of a 1990s personal home page through normal keyword searches, and it’s getting harder, even if you type in a genre-specific phrase like “welcome to my home page”. If you find yourself becoming strangely obsessed by the aesthetics of this forgotten genre, including starry backgrounds and animated ‘under construction’ gifs, then I refer you to the world’s expert on the ‘vernacular web’: Olia Lialina.

Update: I almost forgot - we will be discussing ‘online presence’ for postgrads and early career researchers in media and cultural studies at the next MACS meeting, this Friday the 12th Oct, 2.30-4.00pm, at the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies, The University of Queensland.

I’ve been meaning for a while to blog something about the YouDecide project and website, which is part of a major ARC Linkage project based here in the Creative Industries Faculty at QUT, in partnership with SBS, On Line Opinion, and the Brisbane Institute. In short, YouDecide2007 is a citizen journalism initiative, providing a forum for seat-by-seat coverage of the 2007 Australian federal election. From the website:

as much as this is an experiment with a new kind of political coverage, its also a chance for you to hold local representatives accountable and renew parliamentary democracy. Its also a chance for you to be creative, and provide us with the kind of news coverage you’d like to see. We’re accepting multimedia content, including text, video, audio and photos, so featured content could include:

- short, print-style reports
- longer opinion pieces.
- video or audio vox-pops in your local area.
- personal opinion pieces to webcam
- recorded interviews with candidates and opinion leaders
- slideshows combining photographs and audio
- photographic essays
- comment on other people’s articles

Already, the project has had an impact in the wider public sphere, partly because of an interview conducted by Jason Wilson with Peter Lindsay, in which he said that mortgage stress was partly caused by consumers’ ‘financial illiteracy’ and that in his day he had ’sat on milk crates’ until he could afford furniture. This fantastic sound bite apparently prompted a question from Kevin 07 in parliament, sparking a debate on housing affordability and delivering YouDecide’s first ‘gate’: you guessed, they’re gleefully calling it ‘crate gate’. Fantastic stuff.

I gather there is still plenty of room for citizen journalists to sign up to cover the campaign and related issues in their local seat, so if you’re anywhere in Australia, do check it out.

Here’s Jason introducing the project:

In the citizen journalism session at the Australian Blogging Conference last week, we had some very interesting and robust discussion - focused around the YouDecide project - about citizen journalism, what counts as citizenship, and - my own particular interest - strategies for engaging citizens who are not ‘political junkies’ but who may be very actively engaged in local or interest-based issues.

Related:

The team over at MIT have launched a blog for their new Center for Future Civic Media:

Bridging two established programs at MIT—one known for inventing alternate technical futures, the other for identifying the cultural and social potential of media change—the Center for Future Civic Media is a joint effort between the MIT Media Lab and the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program. It has been made possible by a four-year grant from the Knight Foundation. The Center for Future Civic Media will work to create technical and social systems for sharing, prioritizing, organizing, and acting on information. These include developing new technologies that support and foster civic media and political action; serving as an international resource for the study and analysis of civic media; and coordinating community-based test beds both in the United States and internationally.

.

Henry Jenkins discusses what ‘civic media’ might mean as read through the priorities and activities of the Center, why it isn’t synonymous with citizen journalism, and the ways in which we might re-imagine everyday uses of social media as civic media in this entry. He also very kindly refers to some of my work on Flickr and cultural citizenship as part of that discussion. Looking forward to seeing what develops out of the Center as the work there goes forward.

Update: See also Chuck Tyron’s thoughtful article on YouTube and (US Federal) politics in the new issue of Flow.

Ah, the La Boite Theatre (which by the way has a kind of populist/grass-roots brand image but is situated in the hyper-modernist, rational and shiny Creative Industries Precinct here at QUT). Perhaps we should applaud them for doing their bit to keep MySpace bourgeios.

But then again, first an iPod on the cover of their 2007 season brochure, and now this - which may create some tensions, because are they really like a Mac (seamlessly, transparently usable, white, and fun, but with “no user-seviceable parts inside”)? or are they more like a home-built PC (ubiquitous, kludgy, hackable, and dripping with DIY authenticity)? Of course my tongue is firmly planted in my cheek, because I think to the La Boite folks, as for most people, the ipod and myspace signify roughly the same thing - something like “the digital generation”. And to most people, the differences between MySpace and Facebook are about as big as the differences between, say, emo and goth to my grandma.

Quite seriously, I am very glad to see discussions of the ways in which cultural “tastes”, and constructions of what counts as usability (which has serious implications for what counts as literacy), being discussed in relation to social networks.

If you haven’t already, see Dana Boyd’s piece and the AoIR and iDC lists for the actual discussion about Facebook, MySpace, and class (in the Bourdieu-ian sense).

And I was especially impressed with this post to the AoIR list by (soon-to-be colleague) Jason Wilson:

One of the central arguments in the work is that “taste” and cultural preferences mediate class distinctions, that taste is one of the primary ways in which class distance and membership are asserted. This informs my belief that design, “usability” and the contexts of social networking are never neutral, and are always inflected by issues around class (among others). I guess that for me, the problematic assumption would be that social networking, and the selection of an SNS, could take place in a way that somehow evaded, or was innocent of all of this.

Why would I think of this specifically in relation to MySpace vs. Facebook? Well, to amplify on an earlier example, I think that the ways in which the two services can be personalised appeal to different taste formations. The often-”gaudy” nature of MySpace personalisation, arising from users’ ability to insert large amounts of HTML into their profiles to create background images etc. presents a contrast with the essentially “modular” personalisation available with Facebook profiles, where users select from a range of options which do not disturb the given, “clean” colour schemes and layouts of Facebook profiles. The Facebook interface strikes me as very “designerly” - it is reminiscent to me in its look and feel of an OSX application, with all that connotes in terms of “funky”/creative professions, the blurring of work and/in play, and discernment (think of the Mac vs. PC ad campaigns). The use of whitespace, drop-down menus and a very “Web 2.0″ set of icons allow it to be read as uncluttered, fresh and efficient. Personalisation for many Facebook users takes place by way of deferring to the expert knowledges of application designers. By contrast, MySpace personalisations often seem inexpert, distracting, ungainly - in short amateur, even where the “pimping” is outsourced. Coincidentally, both Danah Boyd and I (me in my blog post on the 22nd) are drawn to the metaphor of/comparison with Swedish furniture stores and their emphasis on modularity and design in thinking about Facebook. There are visual rhetorics in Facebook’s presentation that connote a restrained minimalism which is not avant-garde but rational and “tasteful”. This observation chimes with the excitement of those marketing high-end consumer goods about getting access Facebook’s “elite” user base. Facebook’s aesthetic of personalisation appeals to a certain kind of networked, linked-in, design-aware, educated, “mature” (non-emo ) subject, in part because of the “distancing” it offers from messy old MySpace, which begins, by contrast, to resemble the chaos of a teenager’s bedroom wall. In this sense, I think we can talk about class in relation to the design interface.

There’s also an earlier blog post by Jason where he quite provocatively talks about the migration to Facebook as a kind of aspirational, rather than defensive, “white flight”.

If I could throw something else into the mix, all of this discussion about the link between aesthetic norms, constructions of usability (and ‘hackability’), and so on brings to mind the differences between Flickr and YouTube. Apples and oranges, certainly, but perhaps no more so than the MySpace/Facebook comparison. Like Facebook, Flickr’s interface is white, “usable” and vaguely mac-like, and like Facebook, its norms of participation, design and community behaviour were established by a fairly elite subculture early on, but unlike Facebook, Flickr has held onto a reasonably coherent demographic and a reasonably stable “culture”, as far as I can tell. On the other hand, like MySpace, YouTube looks like a chaotic, “tasteless” free-for-all to an eye schooled in middle-class mores and tastes, not to mention the dominant construction of usability that structures the discourses of the “digerati“. But it is also genuinely popular in all senses of that rich and problematic term, and is emerging as a genuine “mass” medium where vernacular creativity and “big media” swim around in the same mix. What’s in YouTube’s immediate and distant future as far as that all goes is another matter entirely.

I wrote about this (sort of) in my AoIR paper on Flickr last year. There’s a lot more of it in my thesis, organised around the dynamics of “usability”, “hackability” and “playability”. I’ll post a copy of that online eventually, but email me if you’re keen to see it earlier.

In my last post, I discussed YouTube’s roll-out of language options and localization, and aired some concerns I have about its cultural implications.

This morning I had a quick look to see how the YouTube community has responded to the move. I’m a bit surprised there isn’t more discussion, celebration, or protest than there is, actually. Especially compared with how intensely the Flickr community debates and discusses even the finest points of changes that are implemented at the site - which speaks to the quite distinctive ‘cultures’ emerging in each of these social networks.

In fact, at YouTube there is just as much protest over another major change that came with the recent redesign: the disappearance of YouTube’s content categories as a browsing option from the front page. And apparently, in typical YouTube fashion, this was done in the “middle of the night”, without forewarning or consultation. CapnOAwesome, for example, seems most concerned about how anyone will find stumble across quality content from the long tail without the invitation to browse categories:

I haven’t found anything like the same amount of discussion of the language and localization issue. But I found a few interesting things.

The dominant line of complaint could be summed up as, “Dude, where’s my country????” - involving mainly people from English-speaking countries who not only resent having to be lumped in with either the US or the UK (which was my first reaction too), but also feel moved to demand a version of YouTube localised for their own countries. Namely, Australia and Canada. See this one and this one:

[link]

These simplistic posts are drawing interesting comments, though:

If they wanted YT to truly be a global experience, they would have just added a language feature so you don’t just have to understand english to fully enjoy it.

That’s what I reckon too. But Ars Technica explains the probable motivation behind this whole thing:

localized versions of the main site might split up the otherwise unified community of YouTube, but will also help the company strike deals with smaller, local content providers and offer more targeted videos to its users.

Even the YouTube blog entry appears to me to be quite confused about the difference “countries” and “languages”.

Meanwhile, BadAlbert (from the UK) is not happy about the “splitting up of the YouTube empire” into “provinces”, and wants to know what the (f**king) point is anyway, if YouTube is not a “global medium”:

US resident Elaina43 obects to the ubiquitous “little flags” at the top of the page, and says she “doesn’t want to be reminded” constantly that she’s in the US, and that furthermore, the presence of the flag makes her feel as though she’s being commanded, “be patriotic! be patriotic! be patriotic!”:

I would love some help with this little investigation: ironically, the only language I speak well enough to understand what people are saying in their vlog posts is English - so I’d love to hear from any Dutch, French, Spanish, Brazilian/Portugese, Polish or Japanese-speaking readers out there who might have come across different points of view. And does anyone have an inside track on what might be going on with Germany or China?

Technorati Tags: youtube, localization, localisation

Via BigMouth Media - well, actually via late-night YouTube browsing, followed by the now-familiar exclamation “Oh, look, YouTube’s changed something (in the middle of the night) again!”:

YouTube has released localised versions of its video sharing website in nine countries around the world. The countries that are getting the special treatment are Brazil, France, Ireland, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain and the UK.

The sites are fully translated into the home country’s major language and offer content more specific to the user’s locale. The specific sites also return search results that are deemed more relevant to the user based on where they are in the world. According to YouTube’s official blog, users will also be able to look forward to country-specific video rankings and comments in the future.

I only noticed because the top right-hand corner of my YouTube page appeared to have suddenly sprouted a little US flag. Naturally my first instinct was to race with all possible speed for the drop-down box to get rid of it and replace it with something else. Because the US flag as the symbol for “I speak English” is one of my pet peeves. Of course, unless I want to finally get around to learning French, Polish or Japanese, my only other option for now is to pretend to be British.

More seriously, I’m ecstatic there are non-English language options, but concerned about what the impacts of Google-style ‘localisation’ of search results might be on the development of an open, cosmopolitan and networked public sphere.

First, it’s entirely possible that too much personalisation and customisation and localisation is actually a bad thing for the development of cosmopolitan cultural citizenship and for cultural innovation. Culturally-relevant content for citizens of countries outside the US is one thing. But to look at it the other way round, the last thing anyone should want is for US-centric content to dominate the YouTube experience of US residents even more than is the case already. We’ll see how it plays out, I suppose.

Second, YouTube’s twitchy behaviour and tenuous relationships with local governments has a slighly chilling effect on the warm, neighbourly glow that ‘localisation’ is meant to provoke.

From Wired-in Terrence Russell:

Even with the new sites, international users will still have access to the original site, as well as all the others. “It is not that we want to limit content by geography,” YouTube’s International Manager, Sakina Arsiwala told Reuters. “Right now, the content will be available to everyone, unless the (media) partner specifies otherwise.”

Well, maybe.

Which brings to mind the tangles and heartache caused by the localisation of Yahoo! and the subsequent filtering of Flickr content viewed from Germany, Korea, Singapore and Hong Kong. The policies are being almost hysterically condemned as ‘censorship’ by some Flickr users. Interestingly, most of the protest seems to be focused around the impacts on German users. I haven’t been as immersed in the issue as I would have been a few months back, but it doesn’t take long to see it’s clearly a complicated and fraught issue. And it’s not going to go away. I wonder how a YouTube localised for Germany will look?

[update] From the horse’s mouth via the YouTube blog:

As these sites evolve, so will your localized YouTube experience, including country-specific video rankings, comments and browse pages – all while being just one click away from the worldwide view.

[...]

We’re extremely excited to be offering YouTube in the languages of so many of our users, since it allows people to express themselves and unite around interesting, relevant videos. We’re looking forward to seeing communities develop between people in their local communities as well as among people around the world. We can’t wait to experience more original content and interesting genres of content in different languages on the site.

Clearly, the language options are a very good thing. But I still don’t see why country-specific content is any more an aid to the development of communities of interest than are keywords, groups and so on. An aid to targeted advertising and content filtering though, certainly.

One of my current research projects is a collaboration with Joshua Green from the Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT. We’re designing a large-scale content analysis of YouTube, with the rather ambitious long-term aim of mapping the emergent genre system of the network.

Part of the planning involves figuring out whether or not our intended project legitimately fills a gap in knowledge, and how we might build on, learn from, or at least acknowledge what’s already being done. Unsurprisingly, there has been very little published research on YouTube to date, but as I know from doing some work on Flickr, there’s bound to be a lot of research underway.

So, if you or anyone you know is doing any research on YouTube that might be related or relevant and you don’t mind swapping some info, we’d love to hear from you! If you have any leads, please leave a comment here, or if you’d prefer, email me directly.