YouTube: Where Naked Ambition Meets Community Values
This guest opinion piece was writted by Mark Day, an active participant in the YouTube community(ies). It evolved from a comment he left on a recent NewTeeVee post.
As bizarre as it might seem from the outside looking in, “self promotion” has become the deadliest of sins in the eyes of the YouTube community. Beyond YouTube’s own terms of service, there are unwritten codes of community conduct, broken most spectacularly by MadTV’s LisaNova, in the so-called LisaBot scandal covered recently by NewTeeVee.
To understand how a “look at me” culture developed such an itchy case of the “tall poppy” cooties, you probably have to go back to the Kennedy assassination of online video innocence, the unmasking of Lonelygirl15 as an actress (or was it Little Loca’s similar de-closeting?).
Now we’re left with a hangover where a vocal minority of the site’s users obsess on the “authenticity” (or lack thereof) of YouTube’s most subscribed personalities, and cry foul at anything that feels like less than “fair play.” Fool us once, shame on you. Fool us twice, shame on me. Fool us a third time, we’ll post “cheater” videos to expose, well, whatever seems worth exposing — page refreshers, extra accounts, a t-shirt that may or may not have been product placement.
The community contains both webcam diarists of modest ambitions, and larger-than-life personalities for whom ambition has collided with sudden opportunity. If the later group were in bands, they’d be in the car-park, flyering your windshield, passing out demos, recruiting for their street team. On YouTube, they’re always looking for an edge, a leg-up, a bigger slice of the spotlight.
YouTube needs both camps, but it creates a constantly shifting eco-system, where the envelope is pushed daily, and an expectation of fair-play has evolved into a kind of new video Puritanism – if Boh3m3’s Why Do You Tube resulted in almost 400 varied video responses, How You Should Tube is very much up for volatile debate.
The reality is, YouTube contains a number of communities, living under one roof. There are many fine, talented, quirky individuals who don’t aspire to seven-figure viewerships. How YouTube’s city slickers and country cousins learn to live in not-all-that-peaceful co-existence is one of the great social experiments of the age. In that context, LisaBot will probably prove to be just one bumpy pixel in a picture of a very bumpy road.
Mark Day is a videoblogger, copywriter, YouTube content partner, member of XLNTads.com’s creator advisory board, and online marketing consultant at RooftopComedy.com. He is based in the Bay Area.
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[...] as fulfillment of Ackerman Greenberg’s premise. We’ve written before about how permissive YouTube has been about its users’ methods of generating video views — which also [...]
Shady Secrets of Going Viral on YouTube …
— 12:14 AM on November 24, 2007
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To everyone outside the Youtube community (i.e. the entertainment industry), popularity means very little versus actual talent…and last time I checked, Mr. Day was promoting himself on every video sharing site known to man..and he’ll most likely be on the next one that pops up.
What’s interesting to me is how the company is or isn’t making changes to the site in response. There very much seems to be a laissez fair attitude, up and until money gets involved. Certainly other large social network sites are dealing with similar issues, including Digg and Flickr.
The “exposing fakes” crowd are living in a beautiful, tasty irony: they’re slipstreaming celebrities. The idea of little puritans unknowingly behaving as cultural parasites rocks my mirth gland to hell. They’re self-appointed Youtube police and it’s exciting to see them out themselves as best-avoided wet blankets. Fortunately, not all of the Youtube culture is eating itself: there are folk like Mark creating new work. And that’s what it’s all about.
James:
True, in the alternate reality where Arrested Development got picked up for a few more seasons, all movies achieved box office in exact proportion to some carefully calibrated ‘quality’ scale and exceptionally unphotogenic musicians got all the air time on MTV.
In this dimension, well, not so much.
To borrow from one of Chuck Klosterman’s favorite themes, I think weighing in on whether someone’s creative output is over-rated or under-rated is the most natural thing in the world. The difference is, outside of rap “answer records”, there hasn’t really been a medium where the content and the critique can take exactly the same form. You can trash Spiderman 3 without ever really thinking, “I could do better…” (although…). But in online video, the playing field is (somewhat) level. Even when it’s not.
That makes for an interesting, messy, and sometimes cannibalistic dialogue.
I don’t see it as YT “puritan police” trying to mold the website as they see fit, other than in one regard.
These people want to see creative people who do it because they love to create. They don’t care for those who are in it just to make a buck, and IMO, rightly so.
They don’t want to be lied to, and they don’t want to be used as a stepping stone on someone’s quest for fame and fortune.
LisaNova is a talented young lady who rose to fame because she was entertaining. The “flyering your windshield, passing out demos” stage has passed for Lisa. She’s gained as much success as one could get from that website. The spam was not necessary.
What really bothered me though was that knowing that soon after, I’d get hammered with spam from those emulating her actions, and I’m still getting hammered with spam on my page because of it.
I also discovered that Lisa has outright deceived the community for her own gain, which I will go into more detail in on my upcoming YT news channel on the July 9th.
Anyways, all I have to say is if you want to create, CREATE. Your talent will be rewarded, but PLEASE don’t treat me as a means to an end along the way.