Having carried out this micro-ethnography on the Schama
documentary, I like to suggest that the YouTube environment is a rhizomatic
environment, with online expansion located in multiple sites. There is no
recognisable structure, a forest that has grown, to some extent uncontrollably,
only limited by the YouTube community guidelines.
Each new video upload can be
seen as a new fringe, expanding the clusters of entries. For the 7 parts of
this documentary there is no real entrance nor natural exit to the discussions.
The timeline of the discussion is the only linear structure, although technical
errors (duplication of postings) seem to occur. Exploring these individual
posts gives information on users, mostly pseudonyms, and on occasion the
appearance of (what I am assuming) real names. Each profile listing (real or other)
invites the viewer to further investigate additional online viewing habits,
creating new ‘line of flights’ (Deleuze), touching other expansions which also
have YouTube uploads.
This on-going dialectic of territorialising vs. de-territorialising
is a distinct feature of YouTube with its interface encouraging such activity. Discussions
are disjunctive, a-synchronous (months, indeed years in-between) creating a
time lapse.
Rather than offer a narrow field of discussion
characteristic of a select forum, the YouTube ‘frontier’ invites viewers to post comments other than
the topic of the uploaded material, in this case the life and work of Mark
Rothko. In the 7 sections, comments reflect the production of the video, the
music, reactions to the voice-over, the cinematography, the socio-economic context,
incidental facts such as the weather, grammar or spelling issues, spam and
offensive comments that have been removed, etc.
The contents becomes disembedded
from the visual, with more visual dislocation offered within the YouTube
interface through the display of videos on the right. The viewer’s online
YouTube profile is mixed with enticing further uploads, offering multiplicity.
In this context it is difficult to assess whether YouTube integrates or
dis-integrates.
It would be exciting to do further research on this topic in
the future.
Notes:
I did not feel tempted to post my own comments.
Although I did not experience at any time a sense of a community, strangely I
felt best to refrain from posting, in order not to contaminate the environment.
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