In this day and age it is difficult to speak to anyone who has not heard of YouTube. The online internet video sharing platform first launched in February 2005 and since has achieved over 2 billion views per day (4) and according to Alexa the internet statistics company it is the globally ranked the third most viewed website in the world. YouTube was created as an avenue for users to easily share videos created by themselves or others. YouTube's user driven content model is the exact reason why I choose YouTube as my number one online information source. YouTube users often have specific goals or points that they which to communicate. From learning about mathematics, to watching comedy sketches YouTube is a plethora of information that is fully searchable and scalable.
Founded by three former PayPal employees Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim and financially backed by a 3.5 million dollar investment by the Sequoia Capital Investment Firm YouTube remains one of the fastest growing websites in internet history. It has users all over the world, and is easily accessible by anyone with a computer and an internet connect. It aims to bring the world together in a digital community. One can easily observe the digital organism that it has become by simple visiting the website for themselves.
Perhaps it is because of YouTube's accessibility and easy to user interface that the online gaming community has found it usefull for creating tutorial videos describing how to play through specific games. In fact just a single search into YouTube for "game walkthrough" produces about About 7,600,000 results. In fact entire channels are dedicated to these walk throughs online cult communities are based on these channels, and more often than not there is more than a single walk through for any given game, all ultimately similar but by different users. You don't have to read Baudrillard to come to the realization that all of these videos regenerate over and over the same message in the exact same way until all original meaning is lost. A testimate to this fact is easily viewable by watching any video on YouTube and clicking on the "similar videos" suggestions at the end of every video.
In order to provide sufficient evidence that YouTube videos are in fact digital media artifacts, I would like to talk about a specific YouTube user, xNuclearGamingx, this particular user produces tutorial walkthroughs on the latest games, as well as new games that most YouTube users have never heard of. This particular user's selection of "indie games" as well as games designed by big name studios make him an up and coming credible source for new and potentially great games. Recently he posted a video tutorial walkthrough about the recently resleased video Borderlands 2. The walk through below:
Based on Manovich's criteria for what constitutes a digital media artifact, it is clear that this YouTube channel is in fact a digital media artifact. Each video is digitally encoded and represented in binary form on YouTube's servers (Numerical Encoding, Manovich). After watching this video, algorithms recommend new videos to the viewer by xNuclearGamingx without needing human intervention. Therefore it is automatic. Because YouTube allows for variability, and it is modular, demonstrated as the content of the site changes every minute and the individual videos are interchangeable and even in some cases customization using a easy to use time-frame based annotation system. And because each video can be encoded in different formats for different media applications it has variability. In addition YouTube allows other users to comment on xNuclearGamingx's videos and profile thus creating a digital organism.(Manovich) If that's not enough the YouTube API offers individual website owners and developers the ability to fully format comments, videos and channels in any way that they wish. This digitalism/flexibility has given users like xNuclearGamingx the ability to embed their videos on websites and even upload videos from smart phones and other electronic sources.
I remember my first experience with YouTube, I was researching web programming, and one of the first search results that came up was a YouTube video on HTML programming. I don't remember the name of the user who uploaded it, but what I do remember is how clearly they spoke, how their video illustrated all of the key points that auditory learning alone could not fulfill and how easy it was to view other videos about the same topic. There was something magical about learning something for free. I think in some respects that's why I started to use YouTube it felt wrong, like learning something new shouldn't be that easy, or free. This same idea can be applied to the tutorial walkthroughs provided by xNuclearGamingx, by purchasing the game and broadcasting his game play it gives users a chance to decide based on his game play whether or not they want to purchase the video game.
With the discovery of new technologies which enabled screen recording, YouTube became a haven for online academic learning tutorials which eventually were carried on over to gaming industry. Like the videos produced by xNuclearGamingx these videos allow for the monetization of game publishers games as users like xNuclearGamingx demonstrate and in some cases promote their games. By utilizing the concept of "instant and global self publishing" as described by Sullivan , YouTube gives users like xNuclearGamingx the ability to express themselves and to promote their personal views and opinions and to organize their ideas and thoughts in a digital organism.
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