Media item

VideoVortex #3 4.Kylie Jarret

‘Broadcasting the Neoliberal Self: YouTube, Agency and Power’

Encapsulated within YouTube’s exhortation ‘Broadcast Yourself’ is the essence of the site’s promise to users. When engaged with the site they will have the capacity to broadcast a representation of their interests, skills or worldview – their Self. They will also be enabled to do the broadcasting themselves. This slogan serves as a culturally resonant promise of a redistribution of the means of production; of a re-enchantment of the mediated world, if not society generally. Indeed when juxtaposed with the alienating and rationalized industrial model of broadcast media, it seems impossible to not view YouTube and its affordances as a site of renewed agency for individuals. What is less obvious is whether this agency necessarily offers radical potential and the extension of meaningful social power to those who mobilize it.

Using the central conceit that the slogan represents YouTube’s core principals, this paper is an attempt to explore the nature of the site and its relationship to hegemonic neoliberal governance models. In doing so, the agency of the YouTube user as a radical and disruptive form of power is challenged. Nevertheless, this paper seeks to complicate this position with some thoughts about the substantive nature of agency within this assemblage gleaned from an investigation of talk in podcasting. It asks: if the agential power attributed to digital media consumers cannot constitute a rupture of dominant discourses, what form does this power actually take?

 

Kylie Jarrett is Lecturer in Multimedia at the National University of Ireland Maynooth. Her current research is into the nature of talk in pro-am, audio-only podcasting.

 

Creator:

Instituut voor Netwerk Cultuur

Publication date:

17 November 2010

Length:

26:23

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