YouTube at the End of New Media

Grusin – YouTube at the End of New Media
Richard Grusin
YouTube at the End
of New Media
views” and “YouTube” on January 26, 2009, I got over 100,000 results
on the Web. “Million views” and “YouTube” produced 729,000 hits.
“More than,” “views” and “YouTube” gave me 159,000,000 hits. The
rhetorical force of such numbers is to produce something like the feeling
of what Kant characterized as the “mathematical sublime.” Experiencing the YouTube sublime, the mind is unable to conceive the immensity
of the YouTube universe even while it is empowered by the experience
of an affective awe in the face of such immensity.
I am not a big YouTube fan. It’s not that I never visit the site, but that
I rarely — if ever— spend time there without a specific purpose, either
searching for a video I have heard about, or hoping to discover a video
I would like to have seen. YouTube is promiscuous, however; any video
can easily be embedded within virtually any digital medium. Thus when
I learn about a video I should watch, the video is almost always embedded in another medium — the e-mail, text message, blog, Facebook
page or other media form where I learned of the clip in the first place.
In the few times that I have looked around on the site, then, the
most rewarding experiences I have had have been historical, or more
exactly archival. For example, I have been delighted to find some old,
black-and-white Hamms Beer commercials that I remember from watching televised coverage of Chicago Cubs baseball games when growing
up in the 1960s. I have also been interested to find older videos of the
Mutants, Tuxedomoon, or the Residents, obscure or lesser-known postpunk bands I followed in my graduate school days at Berkeley in the late
seventies and early eighties. I have sometimes searched and found video clips of old television shows. During the 2008 presidential campaign,
I was happy to find will.i.am’s mashup of Barack Obama’s “Yes We Can”
stump speech. And before Google purchased YouTube, I was excited
to find non-US videos of suicide bombings and improvised explosive
devices posted to dramatize and glorify resistance to the unjust US invasion of Iraq.
Browsing YouTube produces something like the experience of what
I would characterize as the YouTube sublime. The number of videos on
YouTube is almost too large to comprehend. Especially in print, televisual and networked news media, this sublimity is expressed in various
permutations of the following sentence: “The video of X attracted more
than Y million views on YouTube.” When I googled “more than”, “­million
In Remediation Jay Bolter and I defined a medium as that which
remediates. According to this definition, then, YouTube would appear
to be a medium insofar as it remediates TV. Or is it simply an immense
archival database which has successfully integrated the media practices
of social networking? From the governing metaphor of its trademarked
motto “Broadcast Yourself,” to the implicit equation with (or more accurately difference from) the “boob tube,” YouTube sets out to remediate
TV not merely as a neutral intermediary but as an active mediatior.1
Remediation entails the translation of media forms and practices,
the extension and complexification of media networks. In our book we
saw television at the end of the 20th century as participating in the double logic of remediation via the simultaneous immediacy of televisual
monitoring and the hypermediacy of proliferating mediation, not only in
its windowed interface but also in its connection with the World Wide
Web. YouTube similarly participates in this double televisual logic both
through the immediacy of its extensive, seemingly global monitoring and
through the hypermediacy of its multiple networks of YouTube users,
bloggers, news media, social networkers and so forth. Marshall McLuhan famously defines media as “extensions of man,” technical devices
to extend the nervous system throughout the universe. In McLuhan’s
sense, then, YouTube would also seem to be a medium. It archives and
distributes audiovisual media, which allows us to extend our senses
beyond the range of our body’s geographic environment, introducing us
to people and places, sights and sounds that we would not otherwise
have the opportunity to perceive. But it cannot be emphasized strongly
enough that McLuhan does not mean the “nervous system” to be a
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Grusin – YouTube at the End of New Media
metaphor for technology or perception or even culture. Rather he means
to insist on the physical agency of media to alter not only what he calls
“the ratio of the senses” but also our physiology, our embodied nervous
systems. In Understanding Media, for example, McLuhan repeatedly
cites texts like Hans Selye’s Stress of Life to emphasize the point made
explicit in the title of his collaborative graphic book, The Medium is the
Massage — that our media impact us physiologically.
Too often McLuhan’s talk about the neurological and physiological effect or impact of media is dismissed as a kind of mystical `60s
pseudoscience. But as neurologists, psychologists, social scientists
and increasingly humanists are coming to recognize, the affective or
physiological impact of literature and other media is not incidental, but
instrumental to their cultural power and meaning. Kazys Varnelis, for
example, notes that YouTube participates in the global social changes
that “mass media” like TV have undergone. “Ours is a world of networked publics, in which consumers comment on and remix what they
consume. Composed entirely of clips uploaded by individuals, YouTube
threatens television networks. Snarky commentary on media is now the
norm, much to the broadcasters’ chagrin. Individuals often create their
own media—posting on blogs and on-line venues set up to display their
creations, such as photo-sharing sites.”2
YouTube functions as a remediation of television in the “world of
networked publics” that we inhabit in the 21st century. For Varnelis
and enthusiasts like Lev Manovich, YouTube is an element of a more
interactive, creative public than that produced by television for much of
the second half of the 20th century. Manovich understands this public in terms of “the dynamics of Web 2.0 culture — its constant innovation, its energy and its unpredictability.”3 Paolo Virno, however — along
with Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri — characterizes this public more
critically as the “multitude,” whose contributions to YouTube and other
socially networked media participate in the 21st century manifestation
of Marx’s “general intellect,” providing the affective labor of mediation
in the service of infomedia capitalism.4
Remediation and Premediation
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When Jay Bolter and I created the concept of remediation in the
1990s, we argued that its double logic took a particular form in the IT
boom of the last decade of the 20th century, when new media sought
simultaneously to erase and proliferate mediation. Since 9/11 I have
been tracing the emergence of a media logic that I call “premediation,”
which names one of the predominant media formations deployed by
the “general intellect.” YouTube participates most extensively in one key
aspect of premediation, the intensification and multiplication of technical and social media networks to the point that all future events would
always be pre-mediated. Premediation, I argue, intensified after 9/11 as
a form of medial preemption, one aim of which was to prevent the multitude, as citizens of the global media-sphere, from receiving the kind of
systemic or traumatic shock produced by the events of 9/11 — or later
of 7/7 in England or of 11/26-29 in Mumbai.5 Premediation does not displace remediation but deploys it in different aesthetic, sociotechnical, or
political formations. The double logic of remediation still obtains within
our mobile, socially networked culture, but its conflicting media logics
are formally different.
In the 1990s the ultimate in immediacy was conceived of along the
lines of virtual realities free from the gloves and headpieces of early VR
technology, and artists, academics and activists envisioned and pursued
projects that explored and advanced military, commercial and cultural
applications and implications of these new media technologies. After
the events of 9/11 immediacy is epitomized in the form of media like
YouTube, or projects like the Open Web, which aims to make seamless
one’s multiple interactions with commercial and social networking, with
health and medical records, juridical and educational records, shopping
and entertainment preferences. Immediacy after 9/11 materializes itself
as an unconstrained connectivity so that one can access with no restrictions one’s networked mediated life at any time or anywhere through
any of one’s social-media devices.
Hypermediacy in the 1990s was marked by fragmentation and multiplicity, by the graphic design of Wired or the windowed desktop or TV
screen, or by the audiovisual style of MTV videos and TV commercials.
In the IT boom of the late 1990s, the proliferation of new media forms
and technologies and an increasingly hypermediated screen space was
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enthusiastically celebrated along with IPOs (initial public offerings),
venture capitalist funds and Silicon Valley start-ups. After 9/11 the logic
of hypermediacy is marked by the multiplication of mediation among
sociotechnical, commercial and political networks like YouTube. This
is less the 1990s hypermediacy of formal features or technologies of
mediation and representation than the hypermediacy of network connectivities, of affective participation in and distribution across multiple
sociotechnical and medial networks. In the 21st century hypermediacy
operates within a paradigm of securitization, which entails the registration of every commercial, communicational, or juridical transaction by
a networked media security infrastructure, the complexity and scope
of which proliferate in direct relation to the seamlessness of circulation
through an increasingly open Web.
So, does the advent of YouTube mark the end of “new media”? I do
not mean to ask if the creation of YouTube has brought about the end of
new digital media — but if it signals the end of the usefulness of “new
media” as a category of analysis or classification to make sense of our
current media environment (what I have been thinking of as our “media
everyday”).
Are we, I want to ask, coming to the end of new media, both as
a conceptual or analytic category and as a certain kind of media practice that intensified in the 1990s and has begun to be supplemented by
or remediated into other forms of mediation that entail the logics and
desires of mobile social networking rather than virtual reality or hypermediacy? The question is, thus, whether “new media” within the current media regime of premediation has become too limiting a concept.
The product of certain late 1990s global post-capitalist economic
and sociotechnical formations, new media may turn out to be a problematic analytical concept to make sense of our media everyday, particularly
insofar as it continues to emphasize the “newness” of digital media
rather than their “mediality.” The key to the creation of the field of new
media studies was not its “newness,” but its intensification of mediation at the end of the 20th century. When Jay Bolter and I invented
the concept of remediation, the first general theoretical framework to
i­dentify and analyze the formation of “new media,” we sought precisely
to distinguish what was most interesting about digital media at the end
of the 20th century from the limited corporate concept of “repurposing.” Unlike repurposing, remediation emphasized the intensification
and proliferation of forms and practices of mediation, not simply new
media commodities. Remediation argued explicitly that what was new
about new media was its incessant remediation of other, mostly earlier,
forms of mediation; but it was also the case that remediation operated
through “older” media forms as well, which remediated newer ones
according to the same double logic of immediacy and hypermediacy.
Thus remediation describes a logic of mediation that can be identified in
many different historical media formations and the project of remediation was to insist on the significance of mediation itself.
As at the end of the 20th century, there is still of course a rhetoric of
newness surrounding our culture’s embrace of the latest social-networking platforms like YouTube, MySpace, Facebook and Twitter — particularly
in the mainstream media. This newness participates in the “info-mediacapitalist” need to sell more technical media devices by making them
faster, more powerful, more interactive and more immediate. But in our
current era of wireless social networking the emphasis is not on radical
new forms of mediation but on seamless connectivity, ubiquity, mobility and affectivity. YouTube provides perhaps the paradigmatic instance
of this new media formation, insofar as its popularity is less a result of
having provided users with new and better forms of media than of making available more mediation events, more easily shared and distributed
through e-mail, texting, social networks, blogs or news sites. YouTube
is also part and parcel of the proliferation of still and video cameras as
standard features of mobile phones and the multiplication and mobilization of social networking, so that 3G phones now routinely carry both
cameras and social networks.
At the current historical moment, the double logic of remediation
marks immediacy both in terms of uninterrupted flow and in opposition to mainstream media. What Jay Bolter and I explained in terms of
remediation, Henry Jenkins for example understands as “convergence
culture,” the collision of old and new media. Jenkins proclaims YouTube
as the fullest embodiment of convergence culture, which exemplifies
a completely networked media environment in which different cultural
forms of production converge to provide alternatives to the forms and
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Grusin – YouTube at the End of New Media
practices furnished by consumer culture. Such convergence, Jenkins
argues, is economic and technical as well, furnishing the material conditions for an ideal of a seamlessly interconnected network of data, media
forms and things.6 By making this seamless interconnection easy and
affectively pleasurable, the socially networked immediacy enables and
promotes the proliferation of many different media forms for interacting with the network — different appliances (iPhones, iPods, Blackberry, home and portable networked game consoles, mobile personal
computers) as well as different media interfaces (YouTube, Facebook,
MySpace, Twitter, RSS, blogs, discussion boards and so forth). Hypermediacy is encouraged through the proliferation of different mobile,
socially networked media forms. Leaving as many traces of yourself on
as many media becomes a culturally desirable goal — made pleasurable
in part because leaving such traces works to produce positive affective
relations with our media devices, setting up affective feedback loops
that make one want to perpetuate through the proliferation of media
transactions.
Henry Jenkins’s commitment to convergence culture, however, prevents him from recognizing that the hypermediacy of YouTube also produces a divergence culture that is fragmented, niche-oriented, fluid and
individuated—or perhaps “dividuated,” as Gilles Deleuze says of control
societies.7 Jenkins thus runs the risk of seeing only the immediacy of
convergence culture, one half of the double logic of remediation in the
21st century. Remediation and premediation call our attention to divergence culture as well, which YouTube serves to exemplify with its ability
to be embedded in other media formats, its thousands of channels,
its recommendation system and other features of what has come to
be called networked media’s “long tail.” Unlike the network television
of the 1950s through the 1970s (whether private or government sponsored), which aimed at producing a convergence of a mass audience
of sufficient scale at a particular place and a particular time, YouTube
produces a divergence of audience and message, temporally and territorially, fostering multiple points of view rather than the small number of
viewpoints represented by broadcast television. YouTube not only functions as a 24 / 7, global archive of mainly user-created video content, but
it also serves as an archive of affective moments or formations, much
as television has done for decades.
Endnotes
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1 Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1993).
2 Kazys Varnelis, “Simultaneous environments – social connection and new
media,” receiver magazine no. 21, 2009 – www.receiver.vodafone.com/
simultaneous-environments [last checked 15 February 2009].
3 Lev Manovich, “The Practice of Everyday (Media) Life: From Mass Consumption to Mass Cultural Production?” Critical Inquiry no. 2, 2009, pp.
319 – 331.
4 See Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude (New York: Semiotexte,
2004); as well as Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and
Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin Press, 2004).
5 Richard Grusin, “Premediation,” Criticism no. 1, 2004, pp. 17 – 39.
6 Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide
(New York: New York University Press, 2006).
7 For a discussion, see Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1995).
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