Internet Video Culture in China

YouTube, Youku, and the Space in Between

Marc L Moskowitz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429535550
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Cultura popular

Examining Internet culture in the People's Republic of China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the US, this book analyzes videos which entertain both English and Chinese-speaking viewers to gain a better understanding of cultural similarities and differences.

Each of the chapters in the volume studies streaming videos from YouTube and its Chinese counterparts, Todou and Youku, with the book using a combination of interpretative analysis of content, commentary, and ethnographic interviews. Employing a diverse range of examples, from Michael Jackson musical mash-ups of Cultural Revolution visuals, to short clips of Hitler ranting about twenty-first century issues with Chinese subtitles, this book goes on to explore the ways in which traditional beliefs regarding gender, romance, religion, and politics intersect. Looking at how these issues have changed over the years in response to new technologies and political economies, it also demonstrates how they engage in regional, transnational, and global dialogues.

Comparing and incorporating the production of videos with traditional media, such as television and cinema, Internet Video Culture in China will be useful to students and scholars of Internet and digital anthropology, as well as Cultural Studies and Chinese Studies more generally.

1 Introduction

New technologies and the interface between local and global cultures

Over one billion individuals visit YouTube each month and 70 percent of its traffic originates from outside of the United States (YouTube statistics n.d.). Yet, surprisingly little scholarship focusing on YouTube or the Internet addresses these new techno-cultures beyond the West. The fact that videos and viewers from different countries are in dialogue with each other is an even more neglected area of study. As we will see in the following pages, even the US-based YouTube server includes a plethora of videos that are posted with a Chinese-speaking viewership in mind. Frequently, people from several different geographical regions post commentary to a single site. At times this results in international sharing, at other times they coexist without interaction—safe behind the Tower of Babel. In many of the videos and posted commentaries that I will present, it is clear that the English speaker is conceptually on the periphery of these spheres.

Worldwide, people watch over one billion YouTube videos a day (Strangelove 2010: 4). In six months, it therefore produces more hours of visual media than the television stations ABC, CBS, NBC combined, for their sixty years of broadcasting, had they each been broadcasting twenty-four hours a day, every day of the week (Wesch 2008). Taken another way, twenty hours of video are uploaded every minute, which is an equivalent viewing time to 114,400 new full-length movies (Strangelove 2010: 10).

YouTube is also increasingly part of global culture. In 2006, 70 percent of its viewers were from the United States; two years later, Americans only accounted for 30 percent of viewers (Strangelove 2010: 11). Clearly, this does not represent shrinking numbers of people accessing YouTube in the US but, rather, an increasing access and awareness of the venue in other areas of the world. Given that approximately 79 percent of YouTube content is user-generated (Strangelove 2010: 10) we can see that we have truly entered a new era of cross-cultural creation and communication. Seeking a better understanding of the multiplicities of Chinese Internet cultures, and the conversation between English and Chinese-speaking fan-created domains, is an important next step in expanding our knowledge of these new techno-cultural formations.

Anthropology in the Internet age

As I suggested in the Preface, the speed and scope of the Internet have arguably introduced us to life in the fifth dimension. YouTube and its international counterparts are some of the most memorable and influential aspects of the Internet age. This world of cross-cultural visual dialogues, in which amateur creations exist side by side with million-dollar productions, allows us to laugh and to cry, to share and to rethink the world around us, and sometimes just to relax for a few minutes at the end of a weary day.

Having had the fortune to be alive at the birth of the digital age, many scholars are excited, perplexed, and a tad overwhelmed by the daunting task of bringing anthropological query to this new medium. In informal conversations I have found that a surprising number of anthropologists are skeptical about whether or not studies on YouTube, and the Internet as a whole, can truly be called anthropological. This dismissal of the modern is hardly limited to a mistrust of digital anthropology. Media Anthropology has long been confronted with skepticism. Visual anthropology has also had to justify its endeavors to the larger anthropological community. As a discipline, anthropology has arguably always had a stubbornly traditionalist streak, with an impulse to force culture into a stasis that reveals an inherent mistrust of global trends, such as the consumption of international cuisine, sartorial choices, and other forms of popular culture. Indigenous choices to use new technologies are conceptualized as a betrayal of their culture; a corrupting influence that “we” have had on “them” (Alemán 2012: 148–150). Not that many years ago I was speaking with an anthropologist in Taiwan whose colleagues told him that his work was not “real” anthropology because he studied people in urban settings. Then and now this seemed to be the tail wagging the dog. Should our goal be to adhere to disciplinary standards, or might it be better to adapt our strategies to fit new environments in order to learn more about the world that we actually live in?

Anthropological theorists have called into question place-based ethnology, pointing out the fluidity of local and globalizing influences (Appadurai 1996; A. Ong 1999). These theoretical models serve as important reminders for those who wish to explore digital culture who are confronted with more traditionalist assertions that prioritize place-based ethnographies (Allison 2012; Cool 2012; Whitehead and Wesch 2012). YouTube is particularly ripe for an analysis of anthropological questions of the day, including issues of identity, invented cultures and cultural imagination, globalism, and localization. To neglect this does a disservice to our field.

Anthropologists’ reluctance to engage with mass media has resulted in other disciplines’ appropriation of the field in conducting work that they label as “ethnographic” (Coman and Rothenbuhler 2005: 13). Mihai Coman and Eric Rothenbuhler make a call for what they see as the core anthropological focus of media studies. They express the hope that anthropologists adopt traditional methodologies to new media while keeping traditions of thick description and explaining the meaning and contexts of behavior in relation to larger social processes (Coman and Rothenbuhler 2005: 2).

Participant observation has long been a cornerstone of anthropological methodology and, for many, this is what distinguishes anthropology from other disciplines. Yet, if we define anthropology by its methodology, does that mean that anthropologists have propriety rights to participant observation? Does thick description belong to novelists or anthropologists, and what is served by trying to stake one’s claim in this fashion? How are we to understand new cultural formations if we doggedly clutch at methodologies and theoretical constructs that predate our techno-cultural Renaissance?

Many anthropologists conducting Internet studies have attempted to hold onto traditional anthropological theory and practice when exploring this brave new world. They have practiced participant observation online and many have prioritized the Internet’s political effects or sense of community. This has taught us much, but a good deal has been overlooked in the process. Anthropologists working on YouTube, and the Internet more broadly, are also confronted with the question of how we are to study cultural manifestations when their creators make no claims to being a community (although they clearly thrive on social interaction in the form of sharing videos and posting commentary). Patricia Lange suggests that YouTube viewers do not form a community as such but, rather, that they should be seen as sharing videos of affiliation (Lange 2008). Though she problematizes what community might mean in such a setting, she emphasizes that such videos “encourage feelings of connectedness, closeness or friendship” (Lange 2008: 77). If we broaden the discussion to include other cultures, community might be seen as linguistic or cultural proximity. As we will see in the following chapters, at times this divides along regional lines, while in other instances it transcends those very same boundaries.

Internet videos would seem to represent less of a community than shared, if always contested, understandings and appreciations. This focus allows us to examine language and visual narrative, as well as culturally bound knowledge and assumptions of what is and is not funny or appropriate. Here we can look at anthropological work in other spheres to gain inspiration. Some of the best work on visual anthropology includes little to no interviews with the viewers. The same standard has not been held to Internet studies. Those engaging in analysis of the media as a cultural text face the danger of being accused of abandoning anthropology for cultural studies. Jan Fernback posits that anthropology has much to offer in studying the virtual world, in that it is here that “the place of the individual within the collective and the power struggle … unfolds and boundaries are renegotiated, broken, and formed anew” (Fernback 1997: 53).

Linguistic anthropologists have led the way in anthropological explorations of the effects of new technologies on culture. They have broadened anthropological inquiry to include a discussion of textuality in new cyber discourses ranging from MSN to cell phones.¹ Other linguistic anthropologists have explored the ways that new technologies have profoundly transformed our sociality.² Tom Boellstorf’s work on Second Life (2008), for example, makes us rethink our assumptions about what defines human interaction, and what makes a community. He argues that online lives must be taken as seriously as offline communities as viable cultures of their own (Boellstorff 2008; Boellstorff et al. 2012).

Another challenge of studying digital worlds extends to the problems of fieldwork on popular culture as a whole. How does one explore cultural imagination when those interviewed have little to say beyond “I like it” or “It’s funny.” Do we discard what we cannot quantify, though we know it to be an important part of many people’s lives, and therefore an integral aspect to cultural formation? Because anthropologists often spend years in their country of research, how do we model knowledge of that culture from experiences that predate research on a particular subject? If we restrict our research to either online or offline worlds, what is lost in the process? If we try to do both, do we sacrifice depth for breadth? Anthropological methodologies have always left us fairly limited in time and scale in that we tend to interview dozens of people in one locale rather than conducting surveys with thousands across a nation. This has made the analysis of cross-cultural dialogues in this context particularly daunting.

The first scholastic books to come out on YouTube were in Cultural Studies (see Burgess and Green 2009a; Snickars and Vonderau 2009). These works include several important insights but they are far more invested in the political and economic significance of YouTube than in exploring cultural transformation in the anthropological sense. In anthropology, Patricia Lange and Michael Wesch made some of the first steps in using an anthropological lens to investigate YouTube culture. Wesch provides cultural analysis of genres of YouTube videos as new modes of communication by uploading videos on YouTube that are lectures on the topic of the anthropology of YouTube (2007, 2008). As with most of the scholarship that I have outlined here, these anthropological works focus on Western culture.

Patricia Lange’s work on YouTube use among California high-school students (2008) primarily examines offline lives, emphasizing the importance of the act of producing videos rather than the content that is created. In doing so she provides a rich ethnography for their offline interactions, but she provides less of a sense for what was at stake in their online lives. Several other scholars have also explored digital culture with great success (see Boellstorff 2008; Coleman 2014; Jones 1998; Nardi 2010; Taylor 2006), but these studies are also evidence that in dealing with such a broad a topic, one must make hard choices about what to include and what to ignore. It is hardly surprising that the most influential English-language anthropological works on digital culture focus on America, in that exploring the Internet already presents such an intimidating complexity of issues.

The assumption that offline interactions are more “real” than those that take place online is also problematic (Boellstorff 2008; Boellstorff 2016). As Daniel Miller and Don Slater suggest, “In fact this focus on virtuality or separateness as the defining feature of the Internet may well have less to do with the characteristics of the Internet and more to do with the needs of these various intellectual projects” (Miller and Slater 2000: 5). Offline and online lives converge in important ways. One can maintain friendships in spite of moving to a new location. It is not a stretch to think of academia as a community, though for the most part our face-to-face interactions are limited to a handful of conferences a year and the interactions left to us on Facebook and Twitter.

We must also rethink offline communities. Internet crimes such as pornography, copyright violation, or revealing national secrets have had very real effects on offline lives. Gabriella Coleman’s sensitive account of the hacktivists group Anonymous relates the emotional hardships and prison time that results from illegal online activities (Coleman 2014). Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, and Edward Snowden, who released a breathtaking amount of government documents, have become symbols of heroism to many. But they also serve as a warning for just how dramatically one’s life can be destroyed as a result. Is a family sitting in a room together silently watching television more or less engaged with each other than a group of friends chatting online as they play World of Warcraft? With the interactive game Pokémon go, where is the distinction between online and offline?

Critiques concerning the flexibility of online identities overlook how malleable our presented personas are in offline contexts; the very different ways that we act with friends, parents, or police, for example. There are, of course, sensory experiences that we are deprived of in our online lives, such as olfactory sensations and the feel of an embrace. Another distinctive aspect of offline life is when we are forced to interact when we do not want to—strained conversations with family members and friends that lead to an emotional depth that one does not develop if one can merely sign off when in a bad mood.

Many people look back on the idea of community with a nostalgic sense of loss but forget the ruthless mechanisms of power that are imposed on those who do not fit society’s image of itself. Others feel that online life can be more sincere and meaningful than offline interactions in which one’s identity has been defined by accidents of birth, or by social contexts beyond their control. Some people might turn to the Internet to leave their wheelchair or terminal illness behind, if only for a moment (Graffam 2012: 142). For gay high-school students in conservative small towns, online companions provide a lifeline that includes far more honest friendships than the hidden and fearful closeted identities of their offline lives. These students might share physical space with classmates but that can hardly be said to be more authentic interaction.

Internet videos as modern mythology

Henry Jenkins reminds us that YouTube was not born in a vacuum but, rather, that its quick growth was largely due to long-standing participatory cultures (Jenkins 2009: 109). Where wou...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Preface: life in the fifth dimension
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: new technologies and the interface between local and global cultures
• 2 Mao mash-ups in the YouTube age
• 3 “Hitler hates the iPad” and other sundry tales: revisualizing history and culture in the YouTube age
• 4 Is Spock Jewish, gay, or a high-school cheerleader? Star Trek, YouTube, and nostalgic negotiation of the future
• 5 Seeing sound: a musical, its YouTube trailers, and Hong Kong’s cultural convergence
• 6 Taiwan’s Next Animation Studio battles Conan O’Brien: 3-D animation, the Uncanny Valley, and cross-cultural perceptions
• Glossary
• Index