An anonymous musician plays Pachelbel's Canon on the electric guitar in a clip that has been viewed over sixty million times. The Dramatic Gopher is viewed over sixteen million times, as is a ...severely inebriated David Hasselhoff attempting to eat a hamburger. Over 800 variations, parodies, and parodies-of-parodies are uploaded of Beyonce Knowles' Single Ladies dance. Tay Zonday sings Chocolate Rain in a video viewed almost forty million times and scores himself a record deal. Obama Girl enters the political arena with contributions such as I Got a Crush on Obama and gets coverage in mainstream news networks.
In Watching YouTube , Michael Strangelove provides a broad overview of the world of amateur online videos and the people who make them. Dr. Strangelove, the Governor General Literary Award-nominated author that Wired Magazine called a 'guru of Internet advertising,' describes how online digital video is both similar to and different from traditional home-movie-making and argues that we are moving into a post-television era characterized by mass participation.
Strangelove draws from television, film, cultural, and media studies to help define an entirely new field of research. Online practices of representation, confessional video diaries, gendered uses of amateur video, and debates over elections, religion, and armed conflicts make up the bulk of this groundbreaking study, which is supplemented by an online blog at strangelove.com/blog. An innovative and timely study, Watching YouTube raises questions about the future of cultural memory, identity, politics, warfare, and family life when everyday representational practices are altered by four billion cameras in the hands of ordinary people.
Watching YouTube raises questions about the future of cultural memory, identity, politics, warfare, and family life when everyday representational practices are altered by four billion cameras in the ...hands of ordinary people.
Post-TV Strangelove, Michael
Post-TV,
2015, 20150317, 2015, 2015-03-17, 2015-03-27
eBook
In the late 2000s, television no longer referred to an object to be watched; it had transformed into content to be streamed, downloaded, and shared. Tens of millions of viewers have "cut the cord," ...abandoned cable television, tuned into online services like Netflix, Hulu, and YouTube, and also watch pirated movies and programmes at an unprecedented rate. The idea that the Internet will devastate the television and film industry in the same way that it gutted the music industry no longer seems farfetched. The television industry, however, remains driven by outmoded market-based business models that ignore audience behaviour and preferences.
InPost-TV, Michael Strangelove explores the viewing habits and values of the post-television generation, one that finds new ways to exploit technology to find its entertainment for free, rather than for a fee. Challenging the notion that the audience is constrained by regulatory and industrial regimes, Strangelove argues that cord-cutting, digital piracy, increased competition, and new modes of production and distribution are making audiences and content more difficult to control, opening up the possibility of a freer, more democratic, media environment.
A follow-up to the award-winningWatching YouTube,Post-TVis a lively examination of the social and economic implications of a world where people can watch what they want, when they want, wherever they want.
The empire of mind Strangelove, Michael
The empire of mind,
2005, 20050918, 2019, 2005, 2005-12-15, 20050101
eBook
"Where many critics see the Internet as an instrument of corporate hegemony, Michael Strangelove sees something else: an alternative space inhabited by communities dedicated to anarchic freedom, ...culture jamming, alternative journalism, and resistance to authoritarian forms of consumer capitalism and globalization. In The Empire of Mind, Strangelove presents the compelling argument that the Internet and new digital communication technology actually undermine the power of capital, producing an alternative symbolic economy." "Strangelove contends that the Internet breaks with the capitalist logic of commodification and that, while television produces a passive consumer audience, Internet audiences are more active, creative, and subversive. Writers, activists, and artists on the Internet undermine commercial media and its management of consumer behaviour, a behaviour that is challenged by the Web's tendency towards the disintegration of intellectual property rights. Case studies describe the invention of new meaning given to cultural and consumer icons like Barbie and McDonald's and explore how novel modes of online news production alter the representation of the world produced by the mainstream, corporate press." "In the course of exploring new media, The Empire of Mind also makes apparent that digital piracy will not be eliminated. The Internet community effectively converts private property into public, thereby presenting serious obstacles to the management of consumer behaviour and significantly eroding brand value. Much to the dismay of the corporate sector, online communities are uninterested in the ethics of private property. In fact, the entire philosophical framework on which capitalism is based is threatened by these alternative means of cultural production."--Jacket.
Among the television industry’s biggest fears is the phenomenon known as cord-cutting (also called cable-cutting).¹ Cord-cutting refers to individuals cancelling cable television subscriptions and ...turning to “over-the-top” services such as Netflix, Hulu, Boxee, iTunes, and YouTube, free over-the-air television, or simply pirating all their entertainment needs off the Internet. Small but worrisome declines are being registered across the television system. At the time of writingPost-TVit was still much too early to know how widespread cord-cutting would become. As yet we do not know how many will use the Internet as their primary source for television shows and movies.
Disintermediation Strangelove, Michael
Post-TV,
03/2015
Book Chapter
I beganPost-TVwith a look at music piracy as the predecessor to the habits of the online television audience. Online piracy represents the most extreme state of content and audiences out of control. ...Cord cutters and cord nevers represent the worst possible audience trends for the cable television industry – viewers opting out of paying for cable television. Representatives of the entertainment industry and financial advisers insist that piracy will be reined in and cord-cutting will remain marginal, but the possibility of significant disruption due to uncontrolled digital plenitude remains.
The television industry is aware of the changes taking
With over 219 million viewers the 2012 Olympic Games in London was the most watched television event in US history. The London Games also set records for online television viewing, delivering 159 ...million video streams of events and 20.4 million hours of online video.¹ The London Games demonstrated that a mass audience can be reached through commercial online television. It also demonstrated that Internet audiences will use illicit means to view sports online when they are dissatisfied with a commercial service. Technical problems and NBC’s inferior commentary on the Olympics had Tara Jenson
scrambling for other ways to watch live.
One of the main reasons the Internet represents a threat to the television industry is written in the history of television itself, which is defined by recurring issues of choice and control. The ...television industry has a long history of trying to control audiences and limit choices. The appearance of a medium that is intrinsically difficult to control becomes all the more significant given the considerable efforts to control content and audiences since the early days of television.
Control takes many forms. The anti-competitive behaviour of media conglomerates and concentrated markets found across the globe are forms of control.¹ Media
The list of indictments brought against television is long: degraded self-esteem, sexism and misogynistic values, poor eating habits, the promotion of violence and racial stereotypes, ...hyper-consumption, a neoconservative war agenda, anti-Arab sentiment, polarized elections, increased inequality in political involvement, and much more. Of course television has also been a source of progressive values. Herein my purpose is not to revisit the debate between those who see television as a powerful source of capitalist ideologies and those who celebrate the superior interpretive powers of an active audience. Nevertheless, we are on safe ground when we attribute significant influence to dominant media
