A story about YouTube’s googlization and the hidden community
<p style=”text-align: justify;”>“From You to Tube: YouTube’s googlization and the hidden community” is a short video created by Lasse Timmermann and me for the Digital Methods Seminar. It follows the conceptual and methodological framework of “distilling the ‘textual grammar’ of a website history”<a href=”#_ftn1″>[1]</a> set by the Digital Methods Initiative in the video “Google and the Politics of Tabs”. We have focused on the textuality of YouTube’s header tabs and their change in-time since the Internet Archive prioritize singe sites histories with snapshots above the fold. We attempted to periodize the changes using the Google’s acquisition of YouTube in October 2006 as a time-border. What are the differences in YouTube’s tabs before and after that? Has YouTube become less users and community space for sharing videos and more a search engine for videos? Has ‘search’ substituted ‘share’? We assume that the ‘evolution’ of YouTube’s tabs before and after Google visualizes the process of googlization. Prominent Google critics have argued that the sleekness and opacity of Google’s interface have spread to other online platforms masking the complexity of search algorithms and personal data collection. Our findings based on the Wayback Machine archive for YouTube have supported this assumption. You can see the video here:
<object width=”406″ height=”305″><param name=”allowfullscreen” value=”true” /><param name=”allowscriptaccess” value=”always” /><param name=”movie” value=”http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=7705466&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=00ADEF&fullscreen=1″ /><embed src=”http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=7705466&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=00ADEF&fullscreen=1″ type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” allowfullscreen=”true” allowscriptaccess=”always” width=”406″ height=”305″></embed></object><p><a href=”http://vimeo.com/7705466″>From You to Tube – YouTube’s googlization and the hidden community</a> from <a href=”http://vimeo.com/user2662040″>Lasse Bo Timmermann</a> on <a href=”http://vimeo.com”>Vimeo</a>.</p>
<hr size=”1″ /><a href=”#_ftnref”>[1]</a> M. Stevenson (2009), “The Archived Blogosphere, 1999-2001” in Changing Cultures: Cultures of Change, draft conference paper, p.6
“From You to Tube: YouTube’s googlization and the hidden community” is a short video created by Lasse Timmermann and me for the Digital Methods Seminar. It follows the conceptual and methodological framework of “distilling the ‘textual grammar’ of a website history”[1] set by the Digital Methods Initiative in the video “Google and the Politics of Tabs”. We have focused on the textuality of YouTube’s header tabs and their change in-time since the Internet Archive prioritize singe sites histories with snapshots above the fold. We attempted to periodize the changes using the Google’s acquisition of YouTube in October 2006 as a time-border. What are the differences in YouTube’s tabs before and after that? Has YouTube become less users and community space for sharing videos and more a search engine for videos? Has ‘search’ substituted ‘share’? We assume that the ‘evolution’ of YouTube’s tabs before and after Google visualizes the process of googlization. Prominent Google critics have argued that the sleekness and opacity of Google’s interface have spread to other online platforms masking the complexity of search algorithms and personal data collection. Our findings based on the Wayback Machine archive for YouTube have supported this assumption. You can see the video here:
From You to Tube – YouTube’s googlization and the hidden community from Lasse Bo Timmermann on Vimeo.
[1] M. Stevenson (2009), “The Archived Blogosphere, 1999-2001” in Changing Cultures: Cultures of Change, draft conference paper, p.6
