Henry Jenkins is a professor at the University of Southern California. He focuses on journalism, pop culture, and technology. He maintains a blog that that allows him to express his thoughts on those things he specializes in.
Jenkins made some comments about the culture of YouTube back in 2007 when the company was just starting out. He expressed 9 ideas about how YouTube would come to operate and function. How that YouTube has significantly grown into its own culture, we can assess whether or not Jenkins ideas came to life.
Out of the 9 ideas that he conveyed, I think #6 has been very interesting and useful —
“6. YouTube may embody a particular opportunity for translating participatory culture into civic engagement. The ways that Apple’s “1984” advertisement was appropriated and deployed by supporters of Obama and Clinton as part of the political debate suggests how central YouTube may become in the next presidential campaign. In many ways, YouTube may best embody the vision of a more popular political culture that Stephen Duncombe discusses in his new book, Dream: Re-Imagining Progressive Politics in the Age of Fantasy:
Progressives should have learned to build a politics that embraces the dreams of people and fashions spectacles which gives these fantasies form – a politics that employs symbols and associations, a politics that tells good stories. In brief, we should have learned to manufacture dissent…. Given the progressive ideals of egalitarianism and a politics that values the input of everyone, our dreamscapes will not be created by media-savvy experts of the left and then handed down to the rest of us to watch, consume, and believe. Instead, our spectacles will be participatory: dreams that the public can mold and shape themselves. They will be active: spectacles that work only if the people help create them. They will be open-ended: setting stages to ask questions and leaving silences to formulate answers. And they will be transparent: dreams that one knows are dreams but which still have power to attract and inspire. And, finally, the spectacles we create will not cover over or replace reality and truth but perform and amplify it.
Yet as we do so, we should also recognize that participatory culture is not always progressive. However low they may set the bar, the existing political parties do set limits on what they will say in the heat of the political debate and we should anticipate waves of racism, sexism, and other forms of bigotry as a general public, operating outside of those rules and norms, deploy participatory media to respond to a race which includes women, African-American, Hispanics, Mormans, Italian-Americans, Catholics, and the like as leading figures in a struggle for control over the White House.”
Basically, Jenkins says that YouTube would become a platform that will allow more individuals to become involved in politics and create better communication between our political representatives and our society. I think this proposition has come to light very well. Not only are we able to see the nationally broadcast debates on YouTube channels such as ABC and the GOP themselves, but YouTube has formulated their own Town Hall.
At YouTube’s Town Hall, individuals like us can send in a question about policies and issues. The questions that get answered are selected by votes. The more popular a question and/or topic is, the more likely the politicians will have to answer it.
This is very powerful at transforming Democracy (big D) to democracy (little d). This allows our thoughts to be considered rather than these politicians’. I think the days of “closed-door” policymaking are coming to an end. We, the people, want to be heard.