Diversity and Cultural Citizenship
Youtube is a commercial enterprise, but it’s also a platform designed to enable cultural participation. Participatory culture is Youtube’s core business, it’s a great example of a broader trend towards uneasy convergences of market and non-market modes of cultural production.
As suggested, Youtube’s value is partly generated from the collective creativity and communications of its users and audiences. Access and participation in popular culture is important to political participation and citizenship. This is especially important to women, LGBTQ+ members, religious groups, and ethnic minorites. Cultural particaption also entails the exercising of ‘duties and privilege.’ Not only that but Youtube also provokes questions about the relationships between the indivaidual and a global, culturally diverse idea of a community. With people sharing their own past experiences and encounters with difference. Creators will share themselves being vulnerable, and share intimate choices. And even though Youtube has become more commercial, these social pratices have remained important.
Globalisation and Localisation
With over a decade of change, globalisation and localisation, social discovery, and algorithmic personalisation. Youtube has left a question on whether or not Youtube enables a cosmopolitan media environment. The dynamics of globalisation and localisation are an important aspect of this.
Youtube is ‘global’ since the Internet is, as it’s accessible anywhere in the world. Globalising the virtual borders of the world between geological locations. Then, in 2007 YouTube came out with “localised” versions of their platforms. This started out with France, Brazil, Spain, UK, Japan, The Netherlands, Ireland, Italy, and Poland. But by 2017 there were 97 different countries instead of the original nine. To find your localised country there was a setting option on the menu. An example of a localised version of YouTube is youtube.br for Brazil.
YouTube as Cultural Archive
When adults are asked what they watch on Youtube, typically it’d be some form of nostalgia. Examples being old music videos, forgotten commercials, etc. Music labels have caught onto this and have gone back to their old catalogues and uploaded this material there. But a majority of these old findings are uploaded by amatuers who have these old tapes and collections in their garage which get edited and reuploaded. Youtubers are actively engaged in the preservation of archiving their own history, creating an age of video-bloggers.
Youtubes not only a repository of vintage video content, but it also acts as something more significant. It acts as a living and growing record of the popular culture on the internet. It’s evolved into a massive, heterogeneous, but for the most part it was an accidental discovery, precarious, public archive. This acts as significance for cultural heritage, supplementing a highly specialised cultural archiving institution.