| Internet videos -- Social aspects. |
| Information society |
| Popular culture |
| YouTube (Electronic resource) |
| GooTube (Electronic resource) |
| YouTube Broadcast Yourself (Electronic resource) |
| Net videos |
| Online videos |
| Web videos |
| Culture, Popular |
| Mass culture |
| Pop culture |
| Popular arts |
Available:
Library | Shelf Number | Shelf Location | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
Searching... Foxboro - Boyden Library | 303.4833 ALLOCCA | NONFICTION | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
From YouTube's Head of Culture and Trends, a rousing and illuminating behind-the-scenes exploration of internet video's massive impact on our world.
Whether your favorite YouTube video is a cat on a Roomba, "Gangnam Style," the "Bed Intruder" song, an ASAPscience explainer, Rebecca Black's "Friday," or the "Evolution of Dance," Kevin Allocca's Videocracy reveals how these beloved videos and famous trends--and many more--came to be and why they mean more than you might think.
YouTube is the biggest pool of cultural data since the beginning of recorded communication, with four hundred hours of video uploaded every minute . (It would take you more than sixty-five years just to watch the vlogs, music videos, tutorials, and other content posted in a single day!) This activity reflects who we are, in all our glory and ignominy. As Allocca says, if aliens wanted to understand our planet, he'd give them Google. If they wanted to understand us , he'd give them YouTube.
In Videocracy , Allocca lays bare what YouTube videos say about our society and how our actions online--watching, sharing, commenting on, and remixing the people and clips that captivate us--are changing the face of entertainment, advertising, politics, and more. Via YouTube, we are fueling social movements, enforcing human rights, and redefining art--a lot more than you'd expect from a bunch of viral clips.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Allocca, the head of culture and trends at YouTube, gleans cogent insights into the human psyche from his analysis of popular clips, vlogs, and communities on his company's popular video-sharing platform. Allocca offers a glimpse into the mind's "subconscious drives" through what he describes as "oddly satisfying" videos featuring cookies undergoing surgery and a dishwasher cycle seen through the lens of a GoPro camera, and explores the success of channels such as the popular AsapScience, which he credits to the channel's short, pop-science "explainer" style of videos. He elaborates on technical aspects of YouTube mechanics, including the surprisingly complex way the company determines what constitutes a "view." Allocca also points to the impact YouTube has had on culture globally by "democratizing the power of distribution." This leveling of the playing field is responsible for achievements large and small-particularly the blossoming of niche communities built around, for example, an autistic man's vlog about elevators. Allocca's perspective is skewed by his obvious desire to put a positive spin on all things YouTube, and his suggestion that corporations are using YouTube to "meaningfully interact" with consumers is naive. Still, his sunny disposition is a forgivable flaw for readers looking for a light and entertaining overview of a popular digital platform. (Jan.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Guardian Review
The video sharing website has brought us skateboarding dogs and beauty vloggers, but has it really transformed our lives? The most infuriating consequence of broadband internet is that people now consider it acceptable to send each other links to YouTube videos of people talking about things, rather than links to articles in which these things are explained. Compared with prose, video is a terrible way of transmitting ideas. Kevin Allocca, YouTubes head of culture and trends, claims in this book that YouTube is the largest database of culture in the history of humanity. This makes me both laugh and shiver: in terms of sheer gigabytes, it may be true, but you dont have to be a fusty old bibliophile to suspect that, say, the Library of Congress might be vastly superior. If aliens wanted to understand humanity, Allocca says, hed give them YouTube. God help us all. But of course culture aint what it used to be (it never is). Alloccas book is breezy and packed with stories about fun viral videos, plus a lot of tech cliches about the virtues of sharing and interacting and participating and so on. He is right, though, to point out that YouTube is the home for some truly new forms of expression. Its not all films of dogs on skateboards; there are comedy video game commentators, unexpected musical cover-version artists, people who make supercuts of, say, the way a weather presenter announces a certain word, or ASMRtists, who whisper and stroke fabrics in a way that makes some peoples spines tingle. That so many of these novel genres are entirely parasitical on material from existing media corporations will not trouble the new-media booster, who will trot out the ridiculous canard that all art has always been a remix of other art. That claim assumes there is no difference between artistic influence and literally reusing the same material, to the large financial benefit of companies such as YouTubes parent, Google (now Alphabet) that have historically held a contemptuous attitude to intellectual property. It is revealing that YouTube, like Facebook, was originally designed as a way to help nerds meet women. It was created in 2005 as a dating site, and co-founder Jawed Karim emailed his friends: Can you help us spread the word? Since we just launched, there are no girls on it YET. Now there are, but not in the way he hoped: millionaire beauty vloggers, video gamers, musicians and all the rest, who have achieved internet celebrity through talent and the luck of the network. YouTube does have significant potential value as an educational tool specifically for practical skills, whether it be tying a tie, doing your makeup or learning yoga. And a widely distributed video of some outrageous event as with those of unarmed black men being shot by police officers in the US can generate real political action. But not all political action promoted by widely shared video is desirable. YouTube, it says here, helps all of us share our passions, but some people have notoriously had a passion for murdering others and uploading the videos for the purposes of Islamist propaganda. Yet the dark side of YouTube is, oddly, hardly mentioned in this book at all. We hear nothing, for example, of the pressure exerted in recent years by authorities on YouTube (as well as on Facebook et al) to take down extremist and other nasty stuff, which results in the corporations hiring a new class of moderators placed in awful psychic jeopardy by having to watch such material all day. (YouTube is currently looking into further consequences for Logan Paul, the vlogger who filmed a dead body in Japans Aokigahara forest.) Last November, YouTube announced that it would remove videos by certain jihadist clerics even if they were not directly preaching hatred and violence. In adopting such editorial stances the tech giants make it clearly untenable for them to keep up the fiction that they are merely neutral platforms, rather than publishers. But what really gives the lie to all the guff in this book about how YouTube et al have created a totally new world is the curious fact that all the modern tech giants are desperately aspiring to the status of well, old-fashioned television companies. Far from having destroyed what Allocca calls the old assumption that art and entertainment were thoughtfully considered collaborations from teams of professionals (like, I dont know, the latest Star Wars movie?), YouTube now commissions its own content, as is mentioned very briefly; Apple and Facebook, too, have launched their own TV studios to cash in on the binge-drama goldrush along with Amazon and Netflix. It seems that old-fashioned hierarchies of creative professionals or what the tech overlords refer to dismissively as gatekeepers do have their uses after all. Meanwhile, Ill happily carry on spending much more time watching guitar videos and chess commentary on YouTube than I do watching UK broadcast television, but for heavens sake dont send me any more TED talks. - Steven Poole.
Kirkus Review
The story of YouTube and the video platform's vast cultural influence.Since its inception in 2005, YouTube has grown exponentially from the first video posted by co-founder Jawed Karim of a trip to the zoo to its current state of more than 1 billion active users. Charting the site's development from early days when it was conceived partly as a way for the developers to meet women, Allocca, the company's head of culture and trends and "one of the world's leading experts on viral video," cites the massively popular "Double Rainbow" upload as one of the key moments in YouTube history. The seemingly innocuous footage of a man witnessing two rainbows and his astonished response would become an early viral hit and is a standout example of how YouTube has grown into a platform that enables everyday users to broadcast their voices. The author also highlights several other YouTube success stories, including Korean pop artist Psy's 2012 smash hit "Gangnam Style," which became the first video to reach 1 billion views, the "How-To" video craze, and how uploads have affected political movements in Libya and other hot spots around the world. As a YouTube employee, Allocca has plenty of insider information and access to the company's research and engineering stars that helped create the content powerhouse. However, his position also means that some of the presentation of YouTube's value reads like marketing material for the company. Refreshingly, the author offers more than just a history of YouTube; he takes on the role of anthropologist as he riffs on the current state of popular culture and content consumption. With traditional cultural gatekeepers increasingly strained to maintain relevance and more individuals empowered to create and distribute their own content, YouTube will only grow as a major cultural force.A mostly informative and insightful look into the inner workings of YouTube and its wide-ranging influence. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Allocca (head of culture & trends, YouTube) examines the role of the user in this analysis of the internationally popular video-sharing site. Behaviors of uploading content, liking, commenting, and sharing are the biggest contributors to what is popular and what goes viral (not necessarily the same thing) online. Beyond simple metrics of likes and shares, Allocca also delves into how we form and reinforce community identities around the content, as well as how online video-sharing has changed several industries, including popular music and advertising. Cultural phenomena such as remixing and memes, political implications of wide distribution of cell phone citizen journalism, and the surfacing of previously isolated subpopulations are explored in light of a global, grass-roots, interconnected technology platform. What is missing is much insider information about the business side of YouTube, or how its own practices affect user behavior, whether through placement, site design, algorithms, advertising revenue, or censorship. Readers will likely enjoy revisiting their favorite quirky, emotional, or viral videos used as examples. VERDICT A surprisingly thoughtful read for cultural scholars or any member of this video democracy, which is most of us.-Wade M. Lee, Univ. of Toledo Lib. © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
| Pre-Roll | p. ix |
| Chapter 1 At the Zoo1 | p. 1 |
| Chapter 2 Creating Entertainment in the Auto-Tune Era | p. 23 |
| Chapter 3 The Language of Remixing and the Pure Joy of a Cat Flying Through Space | p. 51 |
| Chapter 4 Some Music That I Used to Know | p. 79 |
| Chapter 5 The Ad your Ad Could Smell Like | p. 108 |
| Chapter 6 The World Is Watching | p. 126 |
| Chapter 7 I Learned It on YouTube | p. 152 |
| Chapter 8 Niche: The New Mainstream | p. 169 |
| Chapter 9 Scratching the Itch | p. 191 |
| Chapter 10 Going Viral | p. 222 |
| Chapter 11 What Videos Do for Us | p. 249 |
| Chapter 12 The New Talent | p. 272 |
| End Card | p. 295 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 305 |
| Notes | p. 308 |
| Index | p. 324 |