"Jean Burgess and Joshua Green insightfully weave together an engaging and much-needed cultural narrative of the astonishing new phenomenon that is YouTube with an incisive critique of its rapidly-mythologised yet deeply uncertain transformative potential." Sonia Livingstone, London School of Economics and Political Science "This book is an important and timely contribution to the literature on participatory culture and media. The analyses provide empirical bases for understanding the diversity of YouTube users' practices and sophisticated theoretical consideration of the social, cultural, political, historical and economic contexts in which these practices are situated and which they so often disrupt." Nancy Baym, University of Kansas
Jean Burgess is a research fellow at the Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation at Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia. Joshua Green is a research manager and Postdoctoral Researcher in the Comparative Media Studies program at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Acknowledgements. Preface. 1. How YouTube Matters. 2. YouTube and the Mainstream Media. 3. YouTube's Popular Culture. 4. YouTube's Social Network. 5. YouTube's Cultural Politics. 6. YouTube's Uncertain Futures. What Happened Before YouTube (Henry Jenkins). Uses of YouTube: Digital Literacy and the Growth of Knowledge (John Hartley)