Final Proposal
January 4, 2010
Taking all of my blogs into account, and all of my reflective reading and blogging I am now confident in what I want to know. I aim to find out, by pinpointing actual YouTube participants, why they upload their particular content to the site.
I have read numerous amounts of articles on YouTube as a form of self-expression and such, and I have to say that most come to a similar conclusion. Take, for instance, Jose van Dijcks article ‘Users like you? Theorizing agency in user-generated content’.
“Over the past 15 years, viewers have increasingly acted as participants in game shows, quizzes, talk shows and make-over programmes. Particularly the surge of reality television has boosted the participation of ‘ordinary people’ in broadcast productions (Teurlings, 2001). In addition, the popularity of personal and communal media (home movies, home videos, community television) has profoundly affected television culture, particularly since the 1980s. What is different in the digital era is that users have better access to networked media, enabling them to ‘talk back’ in the same multimodal language that frames cultural products formerly made exclusively in studios. This is partly due to the availability of cheap and easy-to-use digital technologies, which certainly should stimulate audiovisual production of audiovisual production, but a more important driver is the many internet channels, particularly UGC sites, that allow for do-it-yourself distribution.”
Here he is pointing put that as consumers we have always took an active interest in media, and so the newness of YouTube is not quite so new, but in fact it as a traditional idea which now has the platform for users to upload their own material to be shared by many different users across the world.
This is definitely one of the reasons why people are uploading their material to YouTube, and, in fact, why they are taking their own time to do so, however it cannot be the only reason, there will be personal reasons that range in responses from the users I contact through YouTube and this is what I am mainly interested in finding out, the personal reasons from user to user.
I am not discounting the work I have read you see, I am merely reaching out for more evidence which backs my particulary hypothesis up. The work I have read is extremely interesting stuff and keeps me thinking about YouTube ans its popularity among users around the world, and in the next few weeks there will be more blogs to show you what other work I have been reading as well as my Literature reviews which will tie up all of my background reading.
