Shakespeare and YouTube

New Media Forms of the Bard

Stephen O'Neill

• Publisher: The Arden Shakespeare
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781472500281
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism of Shakespeare
• Index: Literature

The video-sharing platform YouTube signals exciting opportunities and challenges for Shakespeare studies. As patron, distributor and archive, YouTube occasions new forms of user-generated Shakespeares, yet a reduced Bard too, subject to the distractions of the contemporary networked mediascape. This book identifies the genres of YouTube Shakespeare, interpreting them through theories of remediation and media convergence and as indices of Shakespeare's shifting cultural meanings. Exploring the intersection of YouTube's participatory culture – its invitation to 'Broadcast Yourself' – with its corporate logic, the book argues that YouTube Shakespeare is a site of productive tension between new forms of self-expression and the homogenizing effects of mass culture. Stephen O'Neill unfolds the range of YouTube's Bardic productions to elaborate on their potential as teaching and learning resources. The book importantly argues for a critical media literacy, one that attends to identity constructions and to the politics of race and gender as they emerge through Shakespeare's new media forms. Shakespeare and YouTube will be of interest to students and scholars of Shakespearean drama, poetry and adaptations, as well as to new media studies.

1

Searchable Shakespeares: Attention, Genres and Value on YouTube

We must take database watching seriously, not just dismiss it as ‘consuming video clips’.

GEERT LOVINK¹

What the search engine reveals through its list of returns increasingly becomes equivalent to what we can know.

KEN HILLIS, MICHAEL PETIT AND KYLIE JARRETT²

After watching all these videos, I now want to read Shakespeare … Any suggestions?

POST ON THE GEEKY BLONDE’S TWELFTH NIGHT³

YouTube presents us with the exciting prospect of Shakespeare in multiples. There are thousands of videos, making up thousands upon thousands of hours of Shakespeare text, image and sound. The copiousness of content on YouTube is a function of the site’s interrelated dimensions as distribution channel, social network and accidental archive. These create the mix of commercial and non-commercial media, which as users of YouTube we have become so accustomed to. As a video enters YouTube’s databank, it is not subject to a prior set of aesthetic determinants. Nor does YouTube assume any editorial oversight in relation to content uploaded to the site, apart from the requirement that users agree to its terms and conditions.⁴ As digital objects, all videos are equal: this is the YouTube logic of cultural relativism. Value is determined by user search and crucially by the algorithm, which maps and refines use patterns to arrive at the most relevant search results. Within the culture of video-share, then, more traditional determinants of value based on distinctions between high and popular culture come under pressure. The logic of cultural relativism also applies to YouTube’s search function, at least on a superficial level. In searching for any item, we simply input or paste text into the blank white rectangular dialogue box at the top of the screen and then sift through the results that are returned. However, coupled with an automatic and unreflective use of the site as an archive, the ubiquity of the search function potentially blinds us to the computerized search working behind the interface and to the production of knowledge that is occurring.

As noted in the second epigraph, search assumes an epistemological standing, a development that has significant implications.⁵ Value becomes a matter of what attention the user pays to the information or knowledge he/ she is presented with. In the information overload of the Internet, attention is the new economy. We can decide to direct our attention in certain ways – towards the video thumbnail that catches our eye as we scan across the interface. However, the interface not only places demands on our attention, it also shapes what we notice. While YouTube is serendipitous – part of the pleasure of the site comes from the element of surprise derived from happening upon a video through surfing – it is also a controlled-search experience, where relevance is determined algorithmically and where search preferences are increasingly personalized (as evidenced by the ‘Recommended for you’ feature).⁶

In moving from a sense of the plenitude within YouTube Shakespeare towards terms like relevance and determinism, the objective of these opening remarks is not to posit a version of the YouTube algorithm as a sinister form of artificial intelligence (the ‘Halgorithm’, if you will). After all, YouTube’s content comes from its users who, in addition to uploading videos, provide YouTube’s information management system with semantic units (video title, description, tags, comments and so on), which it then processes algorithmically.⁷ Rather, my purpose is to open up a set of questions and contradictions about YouTube, which have a bearing on the Shakespeares we find there, the forms they take and their different locations. When we look closely at YouTube, it presents a set of oppositions, which blend into continuums. These include: copiousness and limitation; chaos and control; humans and machines (or users and the algorithm); the serendipity of video surfing and algorithmic sorting; professional and amateur; consumer and producer; traditional and new media; high and popular expressive forms; global and local.

By exploring these contradictions, this chapter aims to deepen our understanding about the kinds of Shakespeare that YouTube’s culture of video-share occasions. Why do YouTubers engage with Shakespeare and how do we determine what constitutes participation? To what extent does the choice of content within YouTube Shakespeare realize a transnational Shakespeare? Close attention is paid here (and developed over subsequent chapters) to the key genres through which responses to Shakespeare occur. Some genres such as the meme are characteristic of YouTube and Internet culture. Others such as ‘vids’ or fan-made music videos, are associated with earlier forms of amateur culture, but are afforded greater visibility on YouTube. Yet more genres come to the platform via Shakespeare’s citational status, as in the example of the iconic speech.

This chapter inevitably prioritizes some videos over others in discussing these genres and, as with any act of selection, the analysis carries its own value judgements. Recent critical work on Shakespeare adaptations and popular culture provides a useful interpretative framework for approaching the range of Shakespeare content on YouTube. I am thinking here of the move from an evaluative model based on faithfulness to the Shakespearean urtext towards an increasing recognition that those texts that variously cite, adapt, remake or repurpose Shakespeare are themselves cultural objects, with their own set of generic protocols.⁸ In other words, the orientation is Shakespeare-eccentric rather than Shakespeare-centric. This formulation provides for a productive dialectic between those texts that seem to take us away from Shakespeare and those that draw us back towards an enigmatic Shakespearean ‘centre’.⁹ What follows is the consequence of ranging across the unwieldy terrain of YouTube Shakespeare. The chapter seeks to complement the eccentricities and distractions of that terrain with a desire to uncover patterns of Shakespeare’s meaning in that setting.

‘Load more suggestions’: Search as You/Tube like it

YouTube culture brings its own specificities of use, engagement and response to Shakespeare. In pursuing these specificities, I want to take an example of a search category and consider the results of a single search page. By attending closely to a search page, we can begin to consider the key terms or vocabularies of YouTube culture (such as tubing, user-generated content, user-circulated content, watch-page) and to reflect critically on the features and protocols of the browser, its ‘platform-specificity’ and their implications.¹⁰ A search performed on ‘Shakespeare, “As You Like It”’ (with the search filter set on Relevance, geographic location to Worldwide, and language as English) returns ‘About 10,200 results’.¹¹ As viewed on a desktop computer, the search page displays 20 results per page and the search is indicative of YouTube’s mixed content. Of the first 20 videos, 17 come from traditional media (10 from theatre, 6 from film and television, 1 from music), reflecting YouTube’s status as a platform where existing media are re-presented or remediated.¹² The videos include trailers and excerpts from an RSC production currently in the repertory; a clip from a reading of ‘All the World’s a Stage’ for a BBC documentary; the BBC Animated Tales series; the full As You Like It (1936), starring Laurence Olivier; and a full stage production from Bangor University. We have to scroll down to the ninth video – a slide-show video of a Japanese production starring Hiroki Narimiya – before we find a video that can be classified as user-generated content, a term that has gained currency within analyses of YouTube and Internet culture.

User-generated or user-created content refers to amateur media production as distinct from commercial or professionally produced content, although it often borrows from the latter through processes of creative redaction and repurposing.¹³ At work here is the practice of ‘tubing’, that is the ‘act of participating and contributing material with which others will interact’.¹⁴ Within YouTube studies, there has been a tendency to valorize user-generated video because it satisfies a version of YouTube as a community of grassroots users somehow at a remove from the operations of large-scale media. As Jean Burgess and Joshua Green argue, however, ‘it is not helpful to draw sharp distinctions between professional and amateur production, or between commercial and community practices’. Rather, they read YouTube as a ‘continuum of cultural participation’, a model that ‘requires us to understand all those who upload, view, comment on, or create content for YouTube, whether they be businesses, organizations, or private individuals, as participants’.¹⁵ The results for As You Like It reveal the blurring of boundaries between professional content and the activities of non-commercial users: of the six videos from film and television, for example, the Animated Tales As You Like It and Shakespeare’s As You Like It – Helen Mirren have been uploaded by individual users rather than the original producer and copyright holder (the BBC). They constitute user-copied content, where users upload and share found content from existing media, often infringing copyright in the process.¹⁶

These examples illustrate the importance of noting the basic elements of videos. Details such as the title and username constitute video metadata, which enable us to determine the type of content we are dealing with and its provenance.¹⁷ YouTube imbues disparate content with uniformity – each video is presented on the search page with a thumbnail, hyperlink title, upload date and view count. Nonetheless, we should attend to a video’s aesthetic, or how it is ‘calling out to the viewer a specific set of rhetorical or semantic referents’.¹⁸ In some instances, these are easily identifiable but in others it is necessary to look at the upload context. Thus, to return to the example of the Japanese production of As You Like It, the video can be interpreted as a fan homage to actor Hiroki Narimiya on the basis that he features significantly among the other videos in the uploader’s channel. Each subscriber to YouTube has a channel or page, which afford some insight into a user’s activities, including what videos have been uploaded and favoured, the organization of video into playlists and the production of a community through subscriptions to other channels.

The YouTube interface is dynamic and cluttered. At the same time, however, because the site is familiar, the experience of using it can be one of immediacy, with little or no awareness of its medium. Drawing on Bolter and Grusin’s theory of remediation, however, YouTube can also be regarded as a hypermedia environment. First, in remediating older technologies of representation (such as television, theatre and film), YouTube simultaneously absorbs these different forms and also marks their presence, thus ‘maintaining a sense of multiplicity and hypermediacy’.¹⁹ Second, the relation between the user and the interface fosters medium-consciousness: ‘the user as a subject is constantly present, clicking on buttons, choosing menu items’, a level of interaction that interrupts the ‘transparency of the technology’.²⁰ YouTube involves a number of specific features, which shape viewing experience and use. While there are visual constants to the YouTube search page (including the YouTube logo, the search dialogue box, upload button, the Filter menu, the organization into thematic categories and the advert that appears to the right of the search results), its appearance also depends on whether or not a user is logged in. For the non-subscriber, there are highlighted icons and links (‘Popular on YouTube’), subject categories (Music, Sports, Gaming) and a ‘Sign in’ icon that invites the user to subscribe. As a YouTube subscriber, the initial search page will also display Channel features on the left-hand side of the screen. These include links to ‘Watch Later’, ‘Watch History’ and ‘Playlists’, and a list of Channel subscriptions, with feeds indicating new videos that have been posted. As a YouTube subscriber, the user is afforded an added menu of viewing options, thus enabling enhanced interactivity.

Human–computer interfaces, Lev Manovich reminds us, operate according to a selection logic, whereby the user ‘navigates through a branching structure consisting of pre-defined objects’.²¹ Thus, although users are presented with a menu of viewing options, their choices are pre-programmed by the conventions of the YouTube interface.²² In one sense, the vertical arrangement of videos implies a ranking of material in descending order. YouTube also deploys various strategies such as ‘Featured Videos’ and ‘Promoted Videos’ that are designed to optimize the viewing of certain videos.²³ However, each video is a hyperlinked digital object; accordingly, ‘despite the rating systems, each media object on YouTube has equal weight’.²⁴ To borrow Manovich’s terms, YouTube is a ‘flat surface where individual texts are placed in no particular order’ but instead are part of a branching structure, where one object leads to another.²⁵ As a result, the viewing experience becomes a type of ‘spatial wandering’ in which there is a lessening or perhaps even an erosion of temporal consciousness as we move from one video to another an...

Table of contents

• FC
• Half title
• Related Titles
• Title
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations and Online Resources
• Introduction: Interpreting YouTube Shakespeare
• 1  Searchable Shakespeares: Attention, Genres and Value on YouTube
• 2  Broadcast Your Hamlet: Convergence Culture, Shakespeare and Online Self-Expression
• 3  Race in YouTube Shakespeare: Ways of Seeing
• 4  Medium Play, Queer Erasures: Shakespeare’s Sonnets on YouTube
• 5  The Teaching and Learning Tube: Challenges and Affordances
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright