Speak Youtube To Me Analysis

“Speak YouTube to Me”: Investigating YouTube’s Culture and Communities
The label “video essay” is often used as an umbrella term to designate a certain type of audiovisual analysis of film. A precise definition of the video essay is extraordinarily controversial as the video essayistic analysis often overlaps other forms like film essay or intellectual montage. In an attempt to describe the video essay, Andrew McWhirter calls it a “short analytical film about films or film culture” and a “general metonym for video criticism about the cinematic arts and … television” (McWhirter 369). Catherine Grant, on the other hand, offers a broader explanation which encompasses the entire realm of audiovisual essays and essays about audiovisual material
While everyone can create and share videos on YouTube, those who have been doing it systematically for a long time and have gained a certain degree of popularity from it are called youtubers. These are the people that more methodically adhere to the classic YouTube sign off convention, as well as sharing other YouTube distinctive codes such as the use of gifs and memes and an opening sequence or intro. As YouTube personalities, youtubers have a wide number of subscribers, usually over one million, which allows them to sustain themselves economically thanks to the monetization of their videos, effectively making that of youtuber a career. They are also the specific type of YouTube user that I have included in my video essay since I believe that, as opinion leaders and major content creators, youtubers best represent and shape YouTube culture thanks to the high degree of visibility of their videos. While limiting my work to youtubers only, I still made an effort to be as diverse as possible in the way I chose the featured youtubers: the only significant limitation posed to my investigation was that the videos had to be in English, but I was still able to include people of different ethnicity, race, sex, and nationality. Even if most of the YouTube personalities featured in my video essay are American, others come from UK,
Similarly, Raymond Williams refers to it as “one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language” (Raymond 36) and understands it as a particular way of a life, a shared set of codes and meanings inscribed into a symbolic system. From this definition, he sketches a rough formulation of subculture as “the culture of a distinguishable small group” (41), which is completely different from the political and subversive connotation that subcultures retain in Dick Hebdige’s works, where they are mechanisms of disorder that disorient and challenge the normative world (Hebdige 91). Since it revolves around the shared understanding of a system of meanings that are specific to the medium, YouTube as a whole (by which I mean its users, not the physical platform) can rightfully be understood as a culture, even though it does lack some elements to become a subculture: not all of YouTube’s content is political or defiant and, usually, it is not characterized by specific subcultural signifiers and products like music, clothes, and media. However, it is also true that YouTube users could be part of a subculture that uses and shapes the medium YouTube to its own needs and advantages. Following this last point, I would argue that some YouTube communities can rightfully be referred