“There are two different ways in which environmental architecture can mediate experience and exert control. One is through the site navigation, and the other is through the way in which self-directed user action is empowered or limited. While YouTube may come across as a platform that allows its users an unmediated experience, free from ideological oversight at an institutional level, this appearance is far from accurate. The YouTube platform is in actuality a complex system with many levels of ideological interpellation present within its architecture. Furthermore, YouTube is an entity that has non-neutral means of control in place. What this complexity reveals is a push and pull between the structure and the agency of the community. For one, the navigational design directs traffic flow and classifies content, which in turn mediates the user’s experience by presenting her with a set of options. Second, the site privileges users who choose to self-identify, removing the benefits of anonymity.” (Rassi, 2007)
Following in the steps of Matthew Fuller, I believe that an analysis of a platform such as YouTube can’t be complete until we consider the software layer (Fuller, 2008). YouTube, like many other platforms, creates the agency of the user community by handing out a set of actions to help control the content. On YouTube these are: watching, subscribing (to a channel), tagging, categorizing, annotating, sharing, flagging, rating, favorite, adding (to playlist), responding by video and commenting by text . I would like to start of this thesis with an interface analysis of the user-options for control based on the following three basic questions:
How/ when do other users know I used that action?
What happens when I perform that action?
What happens when we all perform that action?
A. Visibility: How/ when do other users know I used that action?
A user needs to be logged-in in order to watch, tag, share, flag, add (to playlist) and annotate his/her own movies. And he/she can flag, share, annotate, comment on, respond to, subscribe (to the channel of), favorite, add (to playlist) and rate videos that are uploaded by other users. Leaving only the options ‘sharing’ and ‘watching’ open for someone without an account to participate in. Although you give up your anonymity for these privileges towards YouTube, not all the options identify you (directly) to the YouTube community. This is the reason why I speak of ‘visibility’ rather than ‘anonymity’, because the user is in control of choosing an alternative name instead of their own. Thus making themselves visible without the need of showing their true identity.
Comments and video responses are easily traced back to the poster, because their name appears above the comment and under the video response. And the accountholder is notified of every comment and video response, if he/she wishes to be notified of this. The other options are not directly traceable; for instance, annotations on a video can be made by the user self, but also by someone who he/she has invited to do so. These cannot be traced back to that specific user. As for ‘watching’, the user can see which users are also watching the video he/ she is watching under the video itself. But this is only visible to users that have set the option ‘Active Sharing’ in their user menu at ‘on’, which can be found by clicking on the television icon on the left side of the username. A user can be notified upon request when his/her channel has a new subscriber. Subscribers can be found on the channel page of a user, where both subscriptions of that user as well as the subscribers to that specific channel can be found. Also which videos that user has recently rated and favorited are shown. But only if the user has checked that section in the channel design of their account to display in their channel, therefore not all channels contain this information. The same goes for videos that have been added to someone’s playlist, a user can have their playlist set on ‘private’ and thus prohibiting users that are not ‘friends’ from watching the playlist as well as avoiding the channel from turning up in search results. A user is not notified when one of his/her videos has been added to someone else’s playlist, shared, rated and/or favorited. When a video has been flagged, the user is only notified when this flag has been accepted, by the YouTube staff, as a legitimate flag. But they don’t inform the user by who it has been flagged. Which makes ‘sharing’ and ‘flagging’ the most invisible options in the sense of not traceable back to a specific user.
Even though not all the actions are directly traceable back to the user, in the interface the user can see an indication of the overall usage of these tools. Some of them are shown directly under or next to the video: how many times a video has been watched (‘views’), how often it has been rated (both in text as well as visualized in stars), favorited and how many comments and video responses it has received. And some reveal themselves after an extra click. The times favorited can be found under ‘Statistics & Data’ under the video together with a top 5 sites linking to that video and how many times those links have been clicked. The category and tags are shown when “more info” is clicked on the right side under the description. The extra click implies a certain hierarchy amongst the actions, as if ratings are more important than how often a video is favorited.
Another aspect of visibility can be found within the comments, which can be rated as either a ‘poor comment’ or a ‘good comment’ or marked as spam. A user can rate a comment only once. Which results in a positive or negative rating after each comment. When a user rates a comment as being ‘poor’ the text become hidden for the user and only the name of the poster will be shown. When the user visits that page again, the text is shown again. When the rating hits ‘-6’ it will stay hidden for all users and cannot be ‘unhidden’ and again only the name of the poster is shown. When a comment is marked spam, it’s handled as a flag and when it has been checked by the YouTube staff, the comment will be marked as spam and hidden by default, but with the option to ‘show’ for the user to read it. What is interesting about this is that nothing gets deleted, it’s just hidden. A similar technique can be seen on the website BoingBoing, which applies a strategy called ‘disemvowelling’ . This technique was started by Teresa Hayden Nielsen and she has since become the comments moderator of the Boing Boing blog. It involves deleting the vowels in an unwanted comment by moderators, which obfuscates the text into a less legible and more neutral one. But again without deleting the comment itself, thus avoiding the discussion of censorship in a certain way and showing the viewers what is seen as non-acceptable.
B. Consequences of one user’s actions: What happens when I perform that action?
Categorizing and tagging are the only two options that cannot be influenced by other users on the level of a specific movie and can only be controlled by the uploading user. He/ she decides under which YouTube defined category to file the movie and how to tag it. Tagging is part of the user-defined filtering system (Marlow, 2006), it helps define which video shows up in the search results. All of the below mentioned overview-pages can be subdivided into categories, to narrows ones search to there area of interest.
C. Consequence of collective-action: What happens when we all perform that action?
Six of the options make up the videos shown on overview-pages such as ‘Videos Being Watched Now’ (watching), ‘Most Viewed’ (watching), ‘Most Subscribed’ (subscribing), ‘Top Rated’ (rating), ‘Top Favorited’ (favoriting), ’Most Responded’ (responding) and ‘Most Discussed’ (commenting). Creating a direct incentive for users not only wanting to have their video showing up in these pages, but also to participate / make use of these options in order to help ‘decide’ which videos show up in these pages.
The option ‘adding to a playlist’ has no direct influence on the content, except that it forms a way to bookmark certain videos for own reference. ‘Sharing’ helps to spread YouTube’s videos around the Internet and is in that way also a form of marketing of YouTube. To encourage this practice, a user does not need to be logged. ‘Annotating’ is a new form of commenting, in which the comments are laid over the video instead of showing up under the video in reversed chronological order. On YouTube the annotations can be more regulated by the user than he/she can control the text comments. Because other users can only annotate on ones video when they’ve invited them to do so. Some platforms, such as the Japanese site Nico Nico Douga, revolve around this form of commenting on videos by enabling all users to annotate all videos making ‘regular’ comments superfluous. Annotating videos, as for now, doesn’t influence the earlier mentioned user-defined filtering system.
Leaving us with the remaining option: ‘flagging’. Which controls the content just like the other options in the sense that it influences it, but not in the same way that it affects what shows up in the YouTube pages or in the search results or on the rest of the Internet. But rather the reversed effect: which videos do not show up. It is the only action with negative connotations that state ‘I disagree with this video’. There are different incentives at play for the users to participate in this .
In the lexicon Software Studies, Søren Pold shows the implicit meanings that buttons contain. And even though not all previous mentioned actions are presented in buttons, such as watching, they share the same politics. They “initiate an immediate action” and “signify a potential for interaction”, but they also and “indicate a functional control.” (Pold, 2008, p. 23) There is not a straightforward cause-and-effect relation between the action and the consequences. This is especially true for ‘flagging’, because not only are the results of the actions not (immediately) visible. There is the chance they will not become visible for it is the only option that gets reviewed by the YouTube staff without leaving room for discussion. It forces “decisions into binary choices – here there is no way of answering that one partially agrees.” (Pold, 2008, p. 23) Which actually forms an argument against the whole idea of flagging, but that is not my intention. For I not only regard flagging as a necessary tool to keep the platform ‘clean’, but I also see it as a trigger device that can foster discussion amongst the community in regards to the topics that cause users to flag videos. Even though it cuts out the option of “I partially agree”, it does forces the user into saying why he/ she does not agree with a certain video. And although these are pre-formulated reasons, with little to no room to elaborate on it, this is preferable above a “you suck” comment that leads nowhere. What I would like to see is that this system gets more open and democratic in order to foster the exchange of opinions, and users can see at all times if and why a video was flagged. Which would also involve the community reviewing the flags instead of the YouTube staff.
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