Christian Sandvig had an interesting lecture, The Television Cannot Be Revolutionized, in which he predicts that online video will become much like TV, and claims there is an ongoing loss of freedom of long tail alternative video-making. While the lecture, and his analysis of ‘distribution bottlenecks’ of online video is worth reading, the dismissal of p2p media seems quite overblown.
Dr. Michael Strangelove, author of Watching YouTube: Extraordinary Videos by Ordinary People (University of Toronto Press, 2010), reacts:
“On Writing Obituaries for Amateur Video Culture
Over the past twenty years there has emerged a clear pattern in how we have responded to innovations in online communicative freedoms and digital cultural production. A new form of expression is developed and quickly adopted, corporations jump on the bandwagon, then left-wing critics cry foul and predict that all is soon to come to and end. We saw this with the world wide web, with digital piracy, with innovations such as peer to peer, and we are now seeing obituaries being penned for the future of online video.
I first wrote about online video in 1994, but the real revolution in online video is merely five years old, launched with the birth of YouTube. Nonetheless, Christian Sandvig offers a somewhat hysterical judgment on the impending ‘retrenchment’ of online video by the old mass media system.
Sandvig argues that alternative sources of online video, such as amateur productions, will be squeezed out by distribution bottlenecks. Yet this is mere speculation and fails to account for the utter failure of the music industry to control online distribution of music (of which 90% remains pirated).
Arguing that a bottleneck of distribution will significantly stifle amateur video culture overlooks market forces of competition. Internet users always migrate to system that enable the greatest communicative freedom.
Sandvig also grossly overstates the failure of amateur culture to depart from the styles and genre of American television. Similarities certainly exist, but amateur video is most certainly a field of tremendous innovation in aesthetics and genre. Amateur cultural production, contrary to Sandvig, does not require intellectuals to valorize its existence. There is no necessary goal for a truly revolutionized video, other than mass participation in cultural production which, as I argue in Watching YouTube, is in itself revolutionary.
One must take a very narrow slice of the world of deinstitutionalized video production to conclude that innovation and participation online video is being significantly thwarted by market forces. Sandvig admits that his argument is based on ‘anecdote and suspicion’ and we do have good reason to be suspicious of YouTube’s long term business plans. We do have good reason to fear for the future of mass participation in unconstrained cultural production. But contra Sandvig, Charlie bit my finger — again! does have a public advocate. It has the voices of hundreds of millions of individuals who are discovering new productive capabilities, and who will not easliy let go of their new found expressive freedoms.
Sandvig’s obitituary is not signifcant for its arguments but for what it represents — a tendency to dismiss the staying power of newly established modes of networked amateur cultural production in a world dominated by privatized commercialized, value systems. We have reason to be vigilant, but this is a century that will bare the stamp of amateur cultural production.”