The Discourse of YouTube

Multimodal Text in a Global Context

Phil Benson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317295112
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The Discourse of YouTube explores the cutting edge of contemporary multimodal discourse through an in-depth analysis of structures, processes and content in YouTube discourse. YouTube is often seen as no more than a place to watch videos, but this book argues that YouTube and YouTube pages can also be read and analysed as complex, multi-authored, multimodal texts, emerging dynamically from processes of textually-mediated social interaction. The objective of the book is to show how multimodal discourse analysis tools can help us to understand the structures and processes involved in the production of YouTube texts. Philip Benson develops a framework for the analysis of multimodality in the structure of YouTube pages and of the multimodal interactions from which their content emerges. A second, and equally important, objective is to show how the globalization of YouTube is central to much of its discourse. The book identifies translingual practice as a key element in the global discourse of YouTube and discusses its roles in the negotiation of identities and intercultural learning in videos and comments. Focusing on YouTube as a key example of new digital media, The Discourse of YouTube makes a substantial contribution to conversations about new ways of producing multimodal text in a digital world.

1
Introduction

Gangnam Style

In December 2014, global entertainment media were flooded with reports on a YouTube phenomenon that refused to go away. Posted on YouTube in July 2012, Gangnam Style, the official music video of a pop song recorded by Korean singer Psy, ¹ had been viewed so many times that it threatened to ‘break’ the YouTube view counter. By the end of 2012, the Gangnam Style view counter had recorded a billion views. By the end of 2013, the number had risen to 2 billion. Now it had reached 2,147,483,647, the highest number, according to a BBC news report, ² that YouTube’s 32-bit integer view counter could handle. Bending beneath the strain of the popularity of Gangnam Style, YouTube’s view counter was in need of a replacement that would ensure that this problem never happens again. Announcing the launch of a view counter that was capable of registering more than ‘nine quintillion’ views, a YouTube spokesperson proudly declared that the company had ‘never thought a video would be watched in numbers greater than a 32-bit integer … but that was before we met Psy’.

At one level, this is a story about the unexpected popularity of a Korean music video. At another level, it is a story that raises fundamental questions about the production and circulation of new digital media in a global context. YouTube has been studied from several disciplinary perspectives, including information and communication technology, new media studies and cultural studies (Burgess and Green, 2009b; Kavoori, 2011; Lovink and Niederer, 2008; Snickars and Vonderau, 2009; Strangelove, 2010). This book argues that there is also much to be learned by approaching YouTube from the perspective of multimodal studies as text. To illustrate what I mean by approaching YouTube as multimodal text, I ask readers to spend a few moments to locate the Gangnam Style video on YouTube and, without playing the video, take a good look at what is displayed on the screen.

The Gangnam Style view counter story is a story about the popularity of a music video and, from the perspective of multimodal studies, a music video is a multimodal text. But surrounding the Gangnam Style video we also see a much larger multimodal text in the form of the web page in which the music video is embedded. Many YouTube users will be interested only in watching the video and will not pay attention to the rest of the text on the screen. Some users do pay attention to this surrounding text, however, and given that the Gangnam Style video has been viewed more than 2 billion times, in this instance ‘some’ represents a very large number of people. More importantly, much of the text of the page is either written by YouTube users or appears there as a consequence of actions they have performed. The comments on the video—and there are more than 4.9 million of them—are written by YouTube users. The numbers shown on the page, including the number of views, likes, dislikes and comments, are also an indirect consequence of users’ actions. The number of ratings (likes and dislikes) increases as users perform these actions, and the number of views increases each time the video is played.

When we look at the text of the Gangnam Style page without viewing the video, it has much of the appearance of a printed page and, as we are aware of other YouTube pages that are similar in appearance, we might almost think of it as a page in a book. In comparison to the printed pages of a book, however, a YouTube page is strikingly multimodal. It displays video and plays audio. It contains an image of a video player, with buttons that can be pressed much like the buttons on the remote control of a DVD player, and the surface of the page is filled with writing and numbers, still images, hyperlinks, buttons and icons that serve a variety of purposes. There is also so much text on the page that parts of it are revealed only when the user clicks on a button or icon. The relationship of this page to the YouTube web site is also very different from the relationship between a printed page and the book that contains it. This partly relates to differences between the structures of web sites and those of books, but YouTube is also a rather unusual web site. For example, there is no ‘next’ or ‘previous’ page to turn to on YouTube. The sidebar on the right hand side of the page suggests videos that the user might like to watch next and YouTube will, if the ‘Autoplay’ switch in the top right corner of the page is switched on, automatically play them in descending order, loading a new page each time the video changes. But there is no inbuilt navigational structure that connects one YouTube page to another, and the suggestions in this sidebar vary according to the user who is looking at the page. As there are many millions of YouTube pages, it is almost impossible for users to have a sense of the contents of the site as a whole or the position within it of the particular page they are looking at.

These are just some of the ways in which YouTube pages differ from the printed pages of a book or the virtual pages of more conventional web sites. In view of these differences, a number of questions arise. What exactly is the design of the YouTube web site? How does this design support multiple authoring of YouTube as text? How exactly is this text produced? And what part does multimodality play in its design and production? These are among the questions that this book explores and sets out to answer. There are also broader issues at stake, because YouTube is not only a text, but a certain kind of text that has emerged over the last decade or so. Considered as a text type, YouTube is very much a child of what has been called the Web 2.0 era. It has grown up alongside social media such as Facebook and Twitter as an exemplar of web sites that have apparently come up from nowhere to grow, rapidly and globally, to the point where they dominate the world market for the particular services they offer. On these sites, multimodality goes hand in hand with the principles of reliance on user-generated text and multiple authorship on a massive scale. This raises the broader question, which I attempt to address throughout this book, of how multimodality intersects with new modes of engagement with online text and, especially, with interactivity and textually mediated social interaction as key elements in reconfigured relationships between text design, production and distribution.

Multimodal Text in a Global Context

Grusin (2009: 65) argues that the popularity of YouTube is ‘less a result of having provided users with new and better forms of media than of making available more mediation events, more easily shared and distributed through e-mail, texting, social networks, blogs or new sites’. This points to the rapidity of YouTube’s growth since the launch of the site in 2005, not only in terms of numbers but also in terms of expansion across the surface of the globe. You-Tube is used almost everywhere that computers are connected to the Internet. I began this chapter with a story about Gangnam Style not only because it is a highly popular video, but also because it illustrates the impact that the globalization of YouTube’s operation is having on the content of the site. In view of YouTube’s origins in the United States and the global dominance of English in popular culture, it is remarkable that the most popular video on YouTube is not a music video by Taylor Swift or Justin Bieber, but a video of a song that was made in Korea and performed by a Korean artist. ³ It is also remarkable that the song is performed in Korean, although, like the lyrics of many Asian-language songs, a few words of English are also thrown in. The popularity of Gangnam Style is testimony, therefore, to the global character of the growth of YouTube and the complex questions about language and culture that arise from it. YouTube is both a massive and a global text. This book argues that questions concerning the multiple authorship of this text must be addressed in a global context and, in particular, that questions about its design and production must be addressed in the context of its global distribution. It also inquires into some of the implications of the global dimensions of YouTube as text for multilingualism, intercultural communication, and informal language and intercultural learning on the site.

My Research

This book is the culmination of eight years of research on YouTube carried out in Hong Kong and Australia. It began with an informal project in the summer of 2008 involving myself, two Canadian-Asian undergraduate interns at the Hong Kong Institute of Education (now the Education University of Hong Kong), a recently arrived postgraduate student from Beijing, and my 12-year-old son, who was something of an expert on YouTube at the time. The aim of this project was to explore attitudes to the use of English in Asia, by examining comments on YouTube music videos in which two popular Asian singers who were well known for their Asian-language work—Tata Young (Thai) and Utada Hikaru (Japanese)—performed English-language songs. Several years and several conference presentations later, findings from this project were published in an article that examined comments on these singers’ use of English in the context of attitudes towards language, ethnic and gender identities (Benson, 2013). One insight that was carried over into subsequent research was the idea that the language and cultural issues raised by the videos had shaped the language and content of comments, so that the pages containing them evolved as distinct cultural and linguistic spaces within the global text of YouTube.

Stimulated by this study, a second project aimed to explore the activity of ‘fansubbing’ on YouTube, or the modification of videos by the addition of foreign language subtitles. A study of English fansubbed versions of the Chinese-language official music video for the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games again observed that the language issues raised in the video shaped themes in the comments, in this case turning the page into a site for language and intercultural exchange, involving both Chinese-speaking learners of English and English-speaking learners of Chinese (Benson and Chan, 2010). A third study focused on a viral homemade video in which a Hong Kong secondary school student, Ruby, took an English examination invigilator to task for several amusing English pronunciation errors (Benson, 2010). ⁴ Analysis of the comments on this video showed how it had sparked debate on standards of English proficiency, the state of English language education, and a variety of sociolinguistic issues in Hong Kong.

These three studies were small-scale and unfunded. In 2010, I was fortunate to receive funding from the Hong Kong General Research Fund for a larger-scale project investigating informal language and intercultural learning in comments on a larger sample of YouTube videos involving English-Chinese ‘translingual practices’ (Canagarajah, 2013). ⁵ The aim of this project was to identify evidence of language and intercultural learning in the discourse of YouTube comments and to use discourse analysis tools to explore mechanisms of interactional learning. Findings on this aspect of the study have been published elsewhere (Benson, 2015a) and are summarized in Chapter 7 of this book. My work on this project also led to a deeper investigation of the ways in which the text of YouTube comes into being and, in particular, how multiple authors scattered across the globe interact with each other to produce the texts of YouTube pages. An initial sketch for the book focused on the discourse analysis framework for investigating ‘textually mediated social interaction’ that is discussed further in Chapter 6 (Benson, 2015b). An important turning point in the development of this framework was the realization that a comment on a YouTube video was not simply a comment, but could be understood, instead, as a turn in a multi-modal interaction between the commenter and the creator of the video. The introduction of multimodality into the frame of a project that had, up to that point, largely extracted writing from its multimodal context on YouTube led to the development of the full-blown analysis of YouTube as multimodal text that follows.

Outline of the Book

Following this introduction to the themes and context of the book, Chapter 2 introduces the key theoretical concepts in multimodal studies that inform its approach to the analysis of YouTube as text. It concludes by outlining Kress and van Leeuwen’s (2001) approach to multimodal communication practices—involving domains of ‘discourse’, ‘design’, ‘production’ and ‘distribution’—that informs the organization of the following chapters. Chapter 3 situates the history of YouTube in discourses on new online media, focusing especially on the notion of participation. Chapters 4 and 5 discuss the design of the YouTube web site and YouTube pages, while Chapter 6 focuses on the multi-authored production of YouTube texts by the users of the site. Chapter 7 discusses the global distribution of YouTube texts and explores some its implications for multilingualism, intercultural communication and informal learning. Chapter 8 concludes the book by drawing together its main arguments and considering whether the rise of media such as YouTube calls for a rethinking of methodologies for multimodal studies in future research.

While much of the analysis in this book could be illustrated by examples from almost any YouTube page, the pages that I have chosen are mostly of Asian origin and often involve the use of English, Chinese and other Asian languages. This is not only because they are drawn from a project that was designed to investigate language and intercultural learning from a Hong Kong perspective. It is also because I believe that YouTube is a fundamentally global text and, as such, a text in which multilingualism is the norm rather than the exception. Having recently moved to Australia after more than 20 years in Hong Kong, I realize that when YouTube is accessed from the English-speaking world, it can easily be mistaken for a monolingual English site. It was my habit in Hong Kong to set my ‘Country’ to Hong Kong and my language to ‘English’. Much of the content that I saw was in English, but I also saw a great deal of Cantonese and Mandarin Chinese and, to a lesser extent, Japanese, Korean and other Asian languages. Viewed from the vantage point of Hong Kong, YouTube is without doubt a multilingual site and I feel confident that it is equally so when viewed from other multi-lingual parts of the world.

The text of YouTube is to be found on the web pages that make up the YouTube web site. Much of this book is concerned with the design and production of these pages, especially Chapters 5 and 6. The Gangnam Style page is an example of a YouTube page, but there are, in fact, several types of YouTube pages, including pages designed for uploading and managing videos, channel pages designed to help users find their way around the site and information and help pages. The pages on which users view and respond to videos such as Gangnam Style are the main focus of this book. YouTube calls this page type the ‘watch page’, but as this term does not have a general currency, I will call it the ‘video page’. Readers may assume that the phrase ‘YouTube page’ refers to the video page, unless the context clearly suggests otherwise. This is the page type with which readers are most likely to be familiar and, most importantly, it is the type that best articulates YouTube’s purpose as a video-sharing site.

This book also has a great deal to say about the visual appearance of YouTube pages, which, rather inconveniently for someone who writes about it, is regularly revamped by YouTube. The details of my analysis in Chapters 4, 5 and 6 have been revised more than once during the writing of this book, and most recently in April 2016. I strongly recommend that readers visit YouTube while reading this analysis, but in doing so I am aware that there are likely to be inconsistencies between what I have written and what is displayed on the screen. This comment applies both to the visual appearance of pages and to the ways in which YouTube handles such procedures as uploading videos and comments, indexing and retrieval and channel management. Having said this, the processes involved in the design and production of YouTube as text that are at the heart of the book have not changed fundamentally since the launch of YouTube in 2005.

One of the major developments to have affected YouTube in recent years is the rise of hand-held and mobile web-enabled devices. YouTube reports that more than 50 per cent of visits to the site are now made from hand-held and mobile devices. YouTube was designed to operate on computer screens, and the analysis in this book focuses on this design. New designs have evolved for tablets and mobile phones, but because these are designs for small screens they generally involve reduced functionality. This book focuses on YouTube as it appears on computer screens, because this is the form in which users are best able to engage in the production of Yo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Multimodality
• 3 YouTube and New Media Discourse
• 4 Designing the YouTube Web Site
• 5 Designing YouTube Pages
• 6 Producing YouTube Texts
• 7 YouTube in a Global Context
• 8 Conclusion
• Glossary
• References
• Index