We are the music makers tips

The rst category, the so-called Get Some clips, is named after a phrase commonly used by members of the US military: Get some! is the unofcial Marine Corps cheer. Its shouted when a brother Marine is struggling to beat his personal best in a tness run. It punctuates stories told at night about getting laid in whorehouses in Thailand and Australia. Its the cry of exhilaration after ring a burst from a .50-caliber machine gun. Get some! expresses in two simple words the excitement, fear, feelings of power and the erotic-tinged thrill that come from confronting the extreme physical and emotional challenges posed by death. 11 Consequently, the typical Get Some video shows intense, sometimes violent military action, usually involving powerful military hardware, and is almost always set to heavy metal (such as Slayer, Drowning Pool or Slipknot) or rap music (with Tupac Shakur being a particular favorite). The Get Some clips are more often than not a rapid-re series of images or short moving clips set to aggressive, hardcore music.12 Despite the musical accompaniment, many of these videos include live, original audio and dialogue, often with troops indicating pleasure and exhilaration during the heat of battle. A classic example of the Get Some video would be A Bullet With a Name on It, uploaded by WilcoUSMC.13 The video was set to the heavy-metal song of the same name by the band NonPoint. The video opens (in silence) with a quote from the Bibles 23rd Psalm: I will fear no evil, for you are with me, followed by the start of the music and a fade-in to a US soldier pointing a rie out a window. The video is a typical compilation of still images and video footage, including a large number of clips showing gunre and large explosions. The clip ends with a fade to black and the words Semper Fidelis (always faithful). USMC/Iraq Video (Graphic)14 by gyleake also opens with a section (albeit a paraphrase) of the 23rd Psalm (We shall fear no evil) set to the song This Is the New Shit by Marilyn Manson. The video is a skillfully edited piece of work, with the tempo of the still images edited to coincide with the tempo of the music. As the music reaches the climax (sexual connotation intended), the video shifts from still images to live action showing the troops. Unlike A Bullet With a Name on It, USMC/ Iraq Video contains extremely graphic images, footage of dead Iraqi soldiers and thermal-imaging footage of individuals being killed on the ground. The clip concludes with images from the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York (an association made in a number of such videos)15 and a nal picture of a piece of heavy artillery with the words livin the dream 07 . There is one Get Some video that is worthy of particular attention, as it has been posted and re-posted on a number of occasions. Footage of the November 2004 siege of Fallujah, shot by Corporal Jan M. Bender, 208 209 Form

expect), the differences between the two can only really be seen in a direct comparison (which is made easier by a split-screen version that the user also uploaded). That the gender coding of dance movements, despite all their sexual equivocalness, can also result in ambiguities is made clear by an additional example. In a corner of his room, a teenager performs Princes Kiss from 1986, wearing a three-quarter T-shirt and a leather jacket and precisely imitating the singers hip movements. Then a friend comes into the image from the side, playing air guitar, his stature still relatively untouched by puberty. As the word kiss is sung, the older boy kisses the younger one, who giggles and retreats from his advances, and the sexual tension immediately explodes into fragments of a childish game, unspoken homoeroticism and intense embarrassment. What moves into the image here is the teenagers room as the narcissistic cell of star/fan subjectication, as Tom Holert writes, but who is a fan of whom remains unclear.15 Even beyond the If we wanted to dene teenagers bedrooms as heterotopias as described by Foucault, they might be understood as equally private and public, actually existing and utopian, performative and transgressive spaces. At issue in this utopia is not an imaginary that appears in strict separation from the given as its beyond, but the transgression and transformation potentials of the given. In a radio version of the heterotopia essay, Foucault explores in quite emphatic terms heterotopias as counterspaces:These counter-spaces, these localized utopias, the children know them perfectly. Of course, there is the garden, there is the attic, or rather the Indian tent in the attic. And, on Thursday afternoon, there is the parents bed. [] These counter-spaces were not truly invented by the children alone, quite simply because it seems that children never invent anything. On the contrary, it is the adults who have invented the children 198 199 Form

For the specic form of circular reference and activities within the user community, the structure of the YouTube page is important. It pools the activities of the prosumer and makes rapid links between videos possible. Without the portal function of YouTube, the circular activity of receiving, producing and commenting would be theoretically possible, but much more complicated, and thus not very enticing. Regarding the situation of reception, YouTube realizes in contrast to television a form 196 197 Form

While YouTube comments follow this contextual logic also, the frequent use of the word talent can be understood in an entirely different way. Expressed in this writing style are not least the difculties of formulating aesthetic criticism, since what is needed here is not just talent, but also knowledge, practice and work that go beyond spontaneous expressions of approval or disapproval. Seen in this way, it is much less an omnipresent excellence and talent scouting perpetuated amongst the users; rather, talent is used as a basically empty signier whenever the writer is at a loss for words, whenever an aesthetic critique cannot be formulated. Series of exclamation points or the repetition of a single letter often also point to the void of not having anything substantial to say: Rock it cutie!!!!!!!!! , Hmmmmmmmmmm ... Comments thus stand in the context of a subjectication that takes place through the expression of thrill, agreement or rejection. Roland Barthes once made a list of things that he loved, and a list of things 194 195 Form

aesthetic randomness is apparently accepted easily: this randomness contrasts profoundly with the thoroughly designed video clips to which the performances refer. But it is precisely this lack of self-consciousness that leads to considerations that not so much emphasize the amateur status of the YouTube video,11 but makes their very mediacy the center of attention. For instance, a logic of recording is clearly active here, one to which the digital or digitalized video is still subject. Naturally, a video camera registers whatever is visible from a certain angle, even if it is contrary to the makers intent. While the focus is solely on the performance of the actors, the framing of the images reveals much more: the room dcor thus supplements the video. This supplementary aspect of the image in turn forms the aesthetic surplus of the YouTube video. Moreover, these videos nd their way into VJ sets12 as artifacts of an authenticity that can scarcely be achieved professionally; they are also broadcast on MTV or reused in advertising.13 These remediations make it clear that the break between analog and digital media is based less on the materiality of the recording process than the increased and instantaneous possibilities of distributing what is recorded. However, it also becomes clear that home dances are not just about amateur self-alteration along professional aesthetic standards. The difference between professional and amateur does not seem particularly applicable here, for it is questionable whether the so-called amateurs judge themselves according to professional standards, or according to the commentaries and answers of other users listed on the YouTube website. In fact, the obvious imperfection of the videos creates a kind of archive of poses and images, its range of elements played repeatedly and varied. This archive is accessible by means of a computer only, through YouTube to be specic. The computer is thus the center of events. As a consequence, there are hardly any home videos that negate or conceal the digital device to which they are addressed. Either the action takes place directly in front of the computer, or computers are more or less explicitly part of the image. The computer is thus always a node in this arrangement as a medium of reference to existing texts, poses and videos already in circulation and at the same time as a medium of distribution of the performers own performance in the future. It could also be said that the actors are engaged with symbolic structures and mediation while a new media structure is in the process of inauguration 192 193 Form

These remakes are attempts at reenacting what is now a historical music video, which itself declares another medium historical. That is a classic new wave music video, as one user writes. To be able to decide who really was there, the users ask one another, How old are you? But of course, in the process of remediation taking place here, that is, in the process of gaining something new from imitating, quoting and varying the old, 8 it hardly makes a difference whether the video was actually seen on TV in 1981 or on YouTube in 2009. For Video Killed the Radio Star awaits with a series of allusions, reminiscences and condensations that describe and initiate a break in the history of media. In many ways the key transformation introduced by YouTube has to do with the possibility of creating remakes or reenactments as home videos and distributing them easily. Movement and dance are not just elements of the video clip that is being consumed, but can be added in home videos as an activity of the prosumer. 9 What was previously done with pop songs at home using mobile audio devices, be they on 190 191 Form

Arguments from media history and the social sciences seem here to coincide almost too perfectly. To sketch out the problematic: on the one hand, the positing of an increasing compulsion to self-represent and -stage often entails an under-dened concept of supercial masquerade, simulation or deceit, raising the question of the authentic subjectivity that provides the foil for comparison.5 On the other hand, the discussion about the increasing mediation of everyday and professional life involves a presumption of a new and fundamental saturation of these realms by the media. This assumption in turn implies that work and private life were previously media-free spaces that are now subject to mediation. Early works of cultural studies, however, problematized this assumption. Studies in the realm of television research, for example, referred to the mutual effects of everyday life and television programming through the structuring of times of day, weekdays and weekends.6 Thus, one needs to take a closer look at the relationship between practices of the self and media apparatuses. In so doing, it becomes clear that processes of subjectication in new media necessarily repeat and vary older and other forms of mediated processes of subjectication. The points of comparison are thus not unmediated subjects, but relations of the self that are mediated in a different way. To account for the current variety of media self-models, Jrg Dnne and Christian Moser have developed the concept of auto-mediacy. They propose a concept of self-referentiality that both historicizes and accounts for media differences. The increasing technologization of the media has not caused an impoverishment in subjective interiority; on the contrary, 188 189 Form

Modes of Comparing In all the examples mentioned above, sports seems to underline the database logic of YouTube.19 Particular items are addressed because there is an external reason to view the clip and because it is possible to access items directly by name, date or category of event. This becomes especially obvious when the database is used not for a repetition and reviewing of or compensation for an important event whose live As a consequence, the referential and intermedial dynamics of media sports highlight YouTubes function as a database. At the same time, the site modies access to sports, especially, as Cornel Sandvoss argues, its spatial determinations. The coverage of sporting events on the Internet contributes to the dual tendencies of cultural homogenization and fragmentation in that it has aided the formation of transnational sports fandom while simultaneously eroding the coherence of national sporting cultures that formed in the post-war era of nation state-centered broadcasting. 20 Still, YouTube places sports performances in a different context than other media, and its specic mechanisms of comparison 244 245 Form

Narrative self-reference: the rhizomatic branching or viral contagion propagating in all directions, while non-hierarchical and at or lateral in its linkage, nonetheless seems to produce a surprisingly high degree of self-reexivity and auto-referentiality, no doubt due to the effects of positive feedback. The demonstrations of chain reaction, mechanical concatenation, Pythagoras switches and falling dominoes are performative also in the sense that they either enact their own conditions of possibility or remediate a previous stage of their own mediality, as nostalgic or ironic pastiche and repetition. For instance, via the Pythagoras switch another meta-dimension emerged, which brought one of the core mechanisms of YouTube into view. One of the creators of the Pythagoras switch series is the video artist Sato Masahiko, one of whose installations, called Bubble Sort, I was linked to. The piece, which shows a line of people waiting, rearranging themselves according to size in fast-forward motion, completely bafed me, until its tags led to several other videos, also having to do with sorting. Masahikos video, it transpires, visualizes a popular sorting algorithm, called indeed bubblesort, explained on YouTube by tens of videos, all manually remediating or graphically interfacing the different sorting algorithms (insertion sort, selection sort, shell sorts, etc.), apparently a favorite pastime for rst-year computer science students. The cast of characters, as we saw, included some well-known names, such as Rube Goldberg, Pythagoras, James Bond; others become known because they sign their work: Antoine BardouJacquet, Fischli & Weiss, Tim Fort, Sato Masahiko; many more merely present themselves to the camera in low-resolution homemade videos. Thanks to all of them, however, the YouTube ways of showing and telling are ludic and reexive, educational and participatory, empowering and humbling; in short: they mark an unusually soft dividing line between creative design and hard-core engineering, storytelling and role playing, singularity and repetition. To put this in the terms of another discourse, more germane to the post-human: it is to nd oneself in the presence of strange organisms, pulsing, moving and mutating, depending on the tags one enters or encounters, as YouTube sorts, lters and aggregates the choices I am not even aware of making. That they cluster themselves semantically is partly a concession to the human interface, but partly also because of a special heuristic value: it is where the cultural noise of verbal language encounters the information of the mathematical program, providing the constructive instability of performed failure, and throwing the grit of human creativity and dirt of human unpredictability into the machinery of perfect human-machine adaptation. The traditional asymmetry of the single point of origin (the author, the narrator) addressing a potentially innite number of readers or viewer was already deconstructed by Roland Barthes writerly text and many other narratologists since. Hence, the multiple authorship of the YouTube tales, when joining up with the selectivity and serendipity of the user, make YouTube a very writerly experience. But the mode of address that I am trying to focus on is also different from the writerly in that it creates an empty space of enunciation, to be lled by the anonymous, but also plural me. On the one hand, a site like YouTube is inherently addictive, as one video drags one along to another and another and another. Yet after an hour or so, one realizes how precariously balanced and delicately poised one is, between the joy of discovering the unexpected, the marvelous and occasionally even the miraculous, and the rapid descent into an equally palpable anxiety, staring into the void of an unimaginable number of videos, with their proliferation of images, their banality or obscenity in sounds and commentary. Right next to 182 183 Form

The opposition between places and non-places derives from Michel de Certeaus distinction between place and space.8 However, Aug uses non-place in a slightly different way than de Certeau, and his vision of the opportunities individuals have in non-places is more pessimistic. For de Certeau space is a practiced place, and through the tactics of everyday use, the oppositional practices of everyday life, individuals can give different meaning to and change spaces. Aug could be interpreted as stating that non-places generate a new relationship to the world, but this relationship is not always negative, and although the term non-place does have negative connotations, it could also be seen as a new opportunity. Not only for the users, those who pass through the non-places, but also for researchers trying to make sense of new situations or phenomena. Tim Cresswell notes that Augs arguments force theorists of culture to reconsider the theory and method of their disciplines. While conventionally gured places demand thoughts which reect assumed boundaries and traditions, non-places demand new mobile ways of thinking. 9 Anthropological place is rooted in history, relationships and identity, and the church may be used as an example of an anthropological place. According to Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney the church embodies the social identity of the people in the same village in their daily social network. It is also a spatial representation of the past, the history of these people and the village. 10 Other similar anthropological places are libraries and archives, places that also embody social identity and history. Non-places, however, are uprooted places marked by mobility and travel; they lack identity, relationships and history. The translation from French to English of the term non-lieu has had consequences for interpretation of the possibilities or dangers of dwelling in non-places, and Ohnuki-Tierney has explained that the term non-lieu in a technical juridical sense means no ground for prosecution, that is, the accused is innocent. Those innocent, needless to say, are deprived of their usual identity as social personae and as individuals. 11 One of the characteristic traits of YouTube is excess. YouTube offers an overabundance of video clips, organized in chaotic ways making precise navigation hard. YouTube is not an anthropological place, dened by identity, relations and history, being closer to a transient non-place, a crossroad where people meet, yet where references are individualized through tags and rating, and where users interpret the information by themselves and for themselves. YouTube is not an asocial place. It is more like a hypersocial place, but the hypersociality of the site is mostly channeled through specic elds or practices, i.e. share a video clip, comment on it, give responses to the uploader, etcetera. As a social process unless used in a specic way by a local community YouTube is characterized by the consumption of information. Commercial clips or references are mixed with all sorts of amateur material, and to a certain degree this changes the status of the non-commercial material. This happens in at least two ways. Firstly, it is done by the commercial context itself. Ending up at a commercial site or viewing a commercial clip characterizes many visits to YouTube, and the lack of context makes it hard to determine what kind of clip or site it is. Few or no distinctions are made between commercial and non-commercial clips, 350 351 Storage