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The Discourse of YouTube The Discourse of YouTube explores the cutting edge of contemporary multimodal discourse through an in-depth analysis of structures, processes and content in YouTube discourse. YouTube is often seen as no more than a place to watch videos, but this book argues that YouTube and YouTube pages can also be read and analysed as complex, multi-authored, multimodal texts, emerging dynamically from processes of textually mediated social interaction. The objective of the book is to show how multimodal discourse analysis tools can help us to understand the structures and processes involved in the production of YouTube texts. Phil Benson develops a framework for the analysis of multimodality in the structure of YouTube pages and of the multimodal interactions from which their content emerges. A second, and equally important, objective is to show how the globalization of YouTube is central to much of its discourse. The book identifies translingual practice as a key element in the global discourse of YouTube and discusses its roles in the negotiation of identities and intercultural learning in videos and comments. Focusing on YouTube as a key example of new digital media, The Discourse of YouTube makes a substantial contribution to conversations about new ways of producing multimodal text in a digital world. Phil Benson is Professor of Applied Linguistics at Macquarie University, Sydney. Routledge Studies in Multimodality Edited by Kay L. O’Halloran, Curtin University For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com 7 Spoken and Written Discourse in Online Interactions A Multimodal Approach Maria Grazia Sindoni 8 Critical Multimodal Studies of Popular Discourse Edited by Emilia Djonov and Sumin Zhao 9 Film Discourse Interpretation Towards a New Paradigm for Multimodal Film Analysis Janina Wildfeuer 10 Multimodal Approaches to Research and Pedagogy Recognition, Resources, and Access Edited by Arlene Archer and Denise Newfield 11 Multimodal Epistemologies Towards an Integrated Framework Edited by Arianna Maiorani and Christine Christie 12 Multimodal Analysis in Academic Settings From Research to Teaching Edited by Belinda Crawford Camiciottoli and Inmaculada Fortanet-Gómez 13 The Structure of Multimodal Documents An Empirical Approach Tuomo Hiippala 14 Multimodality in the Built Environment Spatial Discourse Analysis Louise J. Ravelli and Robert J. McMurtrie 15 The Discourse of YouTube Multimodal Text in a Global Context Phil Benson The Discourse of YouTube Multimodal Text in a Global Context Phil Benson First published 2017 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2017 Taylor & Francis The right of Phil Benson to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data CIP data has been applied for. ISBN: 978-1-138-18242-4 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-64647-3 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC Contents List of Figures and Tables vi 1 Introduction 1 2 Multimodality 9 3 YouTube and New Media Discourse 23 4 Designing the YouTube Web Site 43 5 Designing YouTube Pages 59 6 Producing YouTube Texts 79 7 YouTube in a Global Context 94 8 Conclusion 111 Glossary 115 References 121 Index 131 Figures and Tables Figures 2.1 The Ruthwell Cross 11 2.2 The Baby’s Aesop 17 4.1 A hierarchical web site design 51 4.2 A parallel web site design 53 5.1 Modules on the YouTube video page 63 5.2 The YouTube video player 67 5.3 Comments 70 5.4 A comment and channel icon hover box 71 5.5 A video link 73 Tables 3.1 Statistics on YouTube usage 26 3.2 Levels of participation on YouTube 39 6.1 Orientations toward the Gung Jyuh Behng video as Initiation move 88 7.1 YouTube’s local services and language interfaces 101 7.2 Chinese-English translingual practice: Video genres 106 7.3 Move types in second turn video comments 107 7.4 Exchange sequences in video comments 108 1 Introduction Gangnam Style In December 2014, global entertainment media were flooded with reports on a YouTube phenomenon that refused to go away. Posted on YouTube in July 2012, Gangnam Style , the official music video of a pop song recorded by Korean singer Psy,1 had been viewed so many times that it threatened to ‘break’ the YouTube view counter. By the end of 2012, the Gangnam Style view counter had recorded a billion views. By the end of 2013, the number had risen to 2 billion. Now it had reached 2,147,483,647, the highest number, according to a BBC news report,2 that YouTube’s 32-bit integer view counter could handle. Bending beneath the strain of the popularity of Gangnam Style, YouTube’s view counter was in need of a replacement that would ensure that this problem never happens again. Announcing the launch of a view counter that was capable of registering more than ‘nine quintillion’ views, a YouTube spokesperson proudly declared that the com- pany had ‘never thought a video would be watched in numbers greater than a 32-bit integer . . . but that was before we met Psy’. At one level, this is a story about the unexpected popularity of a Korean music video. At another level, it is a story that raises fundamental questions about the production and circulation of new digital media in a global context. YouTube has been studied from several disciplinary perspectives, including information and communication technology, new media studies and cultural studies (Burgess and Green, 2009b; Kavoori, 2011; Lovink and Niederer, 2008; Snickars and Vonderau, 2009; Strangelove, 2010). This book argues that there is also much to be learned by approaching YouTube from the perspective of multimodal studies a s text . To illustrate what I mean by approaching YouTube as multimodal text, I ask readers to spend a few moments to locate the Gangnam Style video on YouTube and, without play- ing the video, take a good look at what is displayed on the screen. The Gangnam Style view counter story is a story about the popularity of a music video and, from the perspective of multimodal studies, a music video is a multimodal text. But surrounding the Gangnam Style video we also see a much larger multimodal text in the form of the web page in which the music 2 Introduction video is embedded. Many YouTube users will be interested only in watching the video and will not pay attention to the rest of the text on the screen. Some users do pay attention to this surrounding text, however, and given that the G angnam Style video has been viewed more than 2 billion times, in this instance ‘some’ represents a very large number of people. More importantly, much of the text of the page is either written by YouTube users or appears there as a consequence of actions they have performed. The comments on the video—and there are more than 4.9 million of them—are written by YouTube users. The numbers shown on the page, including the number of views, likes, dislikes and comments, are also an indirect consequence of users’ actions. The number of ratings (likes and dislikes) increases as users perform these actions, and the number of views increases each time the video is played. When we look at the text of the G angnam Style page without viewing the video, it has much of the appearance of a printed page and, as we are aware of other YouTube pages that are similar in appearance, we might almost think of it as a page in a book. In comparison to the printed pages of a book, however, a YouTube page is strikingly multimodal. It displays video and plays audio. It contains an image of a video player, with buttons that can be pressed much like the buttons on the remote control of a DVD player, and the surface of the page is filled with writing and numbers, still images, hyperlinks, buttons and icons that serve a variety of purposes. There is also so much text on the page that parts of it are revealed only when the user clicks on a button or icon. The relationship of this page to the YouTube web site is also very different from the relationship between a printed page and the book that contains it. This partly relates to differences between the structures of web sites and those of books, but YouTube is also a rather unusual web site. For example, there is no ‘next’ or ‘previous’ page to turn to on YouTube. The sidebar on the right hand side of the page suggests videos that the user might like to watch next and YouTube will, if the ‘Autoplay’ switch in the top right corner of the page is switched on, automatically play them in descending order, loading a new page each time the video changes. But there is no inbuilt navigational structure that connects one YouTube page to another, and the suggestions in this sidebar vary according to the user who is looking at the page. As there are many millions of YouTube pages, it is almost impossible for users to have a sense of the contents of the site as a whole or the position within it of the particular page they are looking at. These are just some of the ways in which YouTube pages differ from the printed pages of a book or the virtual pages of more conventional web sites. In view of these differences, a number of questions arise. What exactly is the design of the YouTube web site? How does this design support multiple authoring of YouTube as text? How exactly is this text produced? And what part does multimodality play in its design and production? These are among the questions that this book explores and sets out to answer. There are also broader issues at stake, because YouTube is not only a text, but a certain kind of text that has emerged over the last decade or so. Considered as a text Introduction 3 type, YouTube is very much a child of what has been called the Web 2.0 era. It has grown up alongside social media such as Facebook and Twitter as an exemplar of web sites that have apparently come up from nowhere to grow, rapidly and globally, to the point where they dominate the world market for the particular services they offer. On these sites, multimodality goes hand in hand with the principles of reliance on user-generated text and multiple authorship on a massive scale. This raises the broader question, which I attempt to address throughout this book, of how multimodality intersects with new modes of engagement with online text and, especially, with inter- activity and textually mediated social interaction as key elements in recon- figured relationships between text design, production and distribution . Multimodal Text in a Global Context Grusin (2009: 65) argues that the popularity of YouTube 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 new sites’. This points to the rapidity of YouTube’s growth since the launch of the site in 2005, not only in terms of numbers but also in terms of expansion across the surface of the globe. You- Tube is used almost everywhere that computers are connected to the Internet. I began this chapter with a story about G angnam Style not only because it is a highly popular video, but also because it illustrates the impact that the globalization of YouTube’s operation is having on the content of the site. In view of YouTube’s origins in the United States and the global dominance of English in popular culture, it is remarkable that the most popular video on YouTube is not a music video by Taylor Swift or Justin Bieber, but a video of a song that was made in Korea and performed by a Korean artist.3 It is also remarkable that the song is performed in Korean, although, like the lyrics of many Asian-language songs, a few words of English are also thrown in. The popularity of G angnam Style is testimony, therefore, to the global character of the growth of YouTube and the complex questions about language and culture that arise from it. YouTube is both a massive and a global text. This book argues that questions concerning the multiple authorship of this text must be addressed in a global context and, in particular, that questions about its design and production must be addressed in the context of its global distribution. It also inquires into some of the implications of the global dimensions of YouTube as text for multilingualism, intercultural communication, and informal language and intercultural learning on the site. My Research This book is the culmination of eight years of research on YouTube car- ried out in Hong Kong and Australia. It began with an informal project in the summer of 2008 involving myself, two Canadian-Asian undergraduate