YAPA at Helsingfors conference

Simon Lindgren will present his paper, The YouTube Gunman. School Shootings and Media Panics at the Helsingfors conference, “Violence and Network Society: Schoot Shootings and Social Violence in Contemporary Public Life” on November 6-7. You can read the abstract below:

Before the school shooting at Virginia Tech in 2007, as well as before the similar tragedies in Finnish Jokela 2007 and Kauhajoki 2009, the gunmen gave warnings by posting video clips on YouTube. This fact was strongly emphasized in the subsequent news media coverage of these events, and generally it can be said that there seems to have been a media panic about violence and the internet in the aftermath of the shootings. The aim of this paper is to look beyond the assumption that the panic reaction is all-encompassing. Firstly, I will review some search engine and online news statistics in order to evaluate the existence and extent of a panic reaction. Secondly, I will analyze YouTube user comment discourse on school shooting clips. Telling from previous research, it seems reasonable to assume that such participatory media discourse differs largely from traditional news media discourse. The overarching question is whether the panic reaction sequence can be identified in the YouTube comment discourse, or if the latter displays a different pattern.

[...]

Even though the moral panic reaction sequence can be clearly identified in news reporting as well as search traffic relating to issues at the intersection of digital media and school shootings, the main result of this paper is that broadly applying the panic perspective would paint a simplified picture of the emerging new media landscape where audiences play an increasingly active role as co-producers of content (Gauntlett, 2004; Jenkins, 2006b; Jenkins, Purushotma, Clinton, Weigel, & Robinson, 2009).

In line with this, Angela McRobbie and Sarah Thornton (1995) have suggested that the emergence of “multi-mediated social worlds” require a revision of how moral panics are conceived of. While Cohen’s original model was developed for a society where media were univocal, and hegemonical relations were monolithic, today’s media are characterized by fragmentation and multiplicity. McRobbie and Thornton argue that classic moral panic studies (such as Hall et al. 1978; Pearson 1983) have a tendency to overstate the power of hegemony and social control, while understating the role played by counter-discourses. In the age of participatory media it becomes increasingly important to “take account of a plurality of reactions, each with their different constituencies, effectivities and modes of discourse” (McRobbie and Thornton 1995, 564). With this argument, McRobbie and Thornton call for an exploration of various mass, niche and micro-media.

In this paper I have analyzed one such mode of discourse in one particular medium, namely YouTube user comments to school shooting videos. The comment threads under analysis illustrate that the media is to a diminishing degree something that is separable from society. The analyzed texts are not reports on, or narratives about, the school shootings in the traditional media sense. Instead, they illustrate the process wherein social reality is “experienced through language, communication and imagery” (McRobbie and Thornton 1995, 570). The reality of school shootings is continuously being defined in these comment threads, as users discuss issues of bullying, high school culture, gun control, and racism, while at the same time publically, socially, and emotionally trying to deal with the trauma of these events.

via Simon’s blog, http://simonlindgren.com

YAPA at AOIR 10

The first YAPA paper has been accepted at the AOIR 10 conference. You can find the abstract below:

Negotiating blended spaces: How Swedish youth are using video sharing sites as a performative arena.

Globally, every minute 13 hours of video material is uploaded by YouTube’s  3,75 million users – 25% of these users are youth between the ages of 12 and 17(Wesch 2008). Not merely an archive for videos, this video-sharing site is an important site of exchange and participation among a network of users. YouTube has become a platform where commercial and amateur videos share the same hybridized media space as artful productions and documentaries, video diaries and powerful physical performances (Benkler 2006).
Although the users of YouTube represent a wide demographic range, and even broader range of purpose, the affordances of the platform lend itself to the convergence of different cultures in an increasingly complex way (Green & Jenkins 2009). Despite the potential for a networked participatory culture (Rheingold 2002), or new forms of activism as evidenced by the 2008 presidential elections, the discourse surrounding YouTube in the mass media has centered on the platform’s dark side – not least when the participation involved youth-generated videos. Examples of this debate in the Swedish media can be seen through the discussion of ‘warning films’ created by school shooters, or in the considerable number of discussions surrounding cyber bullying and over-sexualized teen videos in the country’s three main newspapers.
Despite the negative picture in the Swedish media of youth on YouTube, Swedish youth are well represented on the site, and are creating and making accessible films that run the gauntlet between diary-like video diaries, to mash-ups, and to innovative, experimental films that blend both an awareness of the physical space, as well as the digital. These videos represent a hybridization of the online/offline space. The paper, Negotiating blended spaces: How Swedish youth are using video sharing sites as a performative arena, is the first report of a three-part project called YouTube as a performative arena (http://www.yapa.se) which will examine the video-sharing site, YouTube as an arena for creative and artistic expression among Swedish youth. The project will bring together cross-disciplinary research in order to gain a better understanding of how youth use these arenas, as well as how the YouTube phenomenon is understood and defined by the traditional, adult-managed media landscape. This initial paper will be an ethnographic study of a Gothenburg based group of youth who explore and remediate Swedish urban environments through the art of parkour. Parkour is often described as physical graffiti, and involves free running and acrobatics in urban environments. The filmed runs connect an international group of youth who share common a interest in the sport, but also act as a static artifact (maintaining a permanent place on YouTube), as well represent a blend of the physical and digital (the physical urban environment remediated into a virtual environment). Both the individual runners and the participants of the youths’ YouTube channels will be interviewed as to motivating factors for participating on the platform, as well as his or her relationship to the blended space these artifacts create. This spatial relationship is especially interesting as the youth are attempting to cover all the main urban spaces in Sweden in parkour runs.  Using ethnographic methods and mediated discourse analysis, this paper will analyze how these runs remediate and blend offline and online spaces, as well as identify motivating factors for Swedish youth to create and share their remediations.
This project is conducted as part of the Swedish Knowledge Foundation’s funded project, YouTube as a performative arena (http://www.yapa.se).

References:
Benkler, Y., 2006. The Wealth of Networks: How social production transforms markets and freedom. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Green, J. & Jenkins, H., 2009. “The Moral Economy of Web 2.0: Audience Research and
Convergence Culture”. In J. Holt & A. Perren, red. Media Industries: History, Theory,
and Method.  Boston: Blackwell.

Jenkins, H., 2006. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press.

Rheingold, H., 2002. Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution. Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus Pub: http://www.smartmobs.com [Accessed October 2, 2008].

Wesch,Mike. 2008. An anthropological introduction to YouTube – Presented to the Library of
Congress, USA. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPAO-lZ4_hU.

Simon and Stephanie speak

Tomorrow Simon Lindgren and Stephanie Hendrick will speak to a group of teachers at Dragonskolan in Umeå about our research on Swedish youth and YouTube. Stephanie will give examples of current trends in usage and Simon will speak about media propagated moral panics.

First meetings…

We have now had our first project meeting, and on Tuesday several of us will travel to Stockholm to meet the other funding recipients. It is exciting to really get started with this project as it is something that has been of great research interest to me over the past year. Over time, updates will be posted here - although we will not update as often as a blog, rather we will use this space more like a ‘current events’ section.

If you have questions about the project, please watch the film we made to introduce YAPA, or email our project leader Patrik Svensson.