Table of Contents

Preface vii

Acknowledgments x

1 How YouTube Matters 1

2 YouTube and the Mainstream Media 15

3 YouTube?s Popular Culture 38

4 YouTube?s Social Network 58

5 YouTube?s Cultural Politics 75

6 YouTube?s Uncertain Futures 100

Henry Jenkins: What Happened Before YouTube 109

John Hartley: Uses of YouTube ? Digital Literacy and the Growth of Knowledge 126

Notes 144

References 152

Index 170

About the Author

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.

Reviews

"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