Staff at Madame Tussauds in San Francisco measure Grumpy Cat, who shot to internet stardom when a photo of her unmistakeable face was posted on Reddit
Barcroft Media via Getty Images
Unless you're a part of the ASMR community, the lift riding community, or the mukbang overeating community, the likelihood is that there are vast corners of YouTube that you've never explored. It's a platform that mimics our world, and is unparalleled in size as a video sharing website. Yet even after 13 years, it's barely understood by many. With its 1.5 billion users, and a billion hours of video watched each day, the platform deserves a book-length analysis of its successes and failures, and a decent explanation of how it wormed its way into our collective consciousness.
Kevin Allocca, for seven years YouTube's head of culture and trends, has attempted to explain "how YouTube is changing the world" in Videocracy, a book that promises to "reveal internet video's massive influence in our world" and paint "a vivid, multi-layered and unexpected portrait of modern culture."
The book is a readable history of viral videos, racing through from lonelygirl15 to What Does the Fox Say? and everything between, including ruminations on Gangnam Style, Numa Numa, Rebecca Black's Friday and #PizzaRat. Videocracy is studded with fun facts that have never been publicly shared before (among them, that worldwide we spend more than 200,000 hours per day watching videos of arcade claw machine games). Each page will bring back memories of the cherished videos that required a rescaling of the viral charts every couple of years.
Yet while it provides plenty of context on some topics – such as mashup videos – it fails to fully explain why they're important. The most in-depth analysis comes in the sections of the book dealing with the spread of viral videos – unsurprising, given that's Allocca's day job – but everything else is sparsely covered. We learn that more than 40,000 vlogs (the classic, personal, intimate address to video) are uploaded a day to YouTube, but not what that tells us about our society, or what it could mean for the millions of fans who watch them and think that the personalities they're seeing are more friends than brands.
It skips over important questions and ducks others entirely. It makes odd assertions. At the most trivial end, Allocca pegs Miley Cyrus, who first gained fame on traditional television playing Hannah Montana, and has 10 million subscribers to her official YouTube channel, as "probably the first major pop star of the YouTube generation" (Justin Bieber, who was literally talent-spotted on YouTube and has parlayed that into a major pop career with 33 million YouTube subscribers, may disagree). At its most egregious, the book claims pre-eminence in catalysing the 2011 Arab Spring, when most contemporary analysis gave credit to Facebook and Twitter for spreading dissenting voices in the face of demagoguery.
A year is a long time on the internet. Penning a comprehensive account of a site like YouTube – which lurches from controversy to controversy, and garlands new viral video stars in a matter of hours, never mind days – is difficult when confronted by the slow-moving world of book publishing. But there's a distinct lack of critical self-analysis of YouTube, its business practices, and its failings in Videocracy. Like another officially sanctioned book by Robert Kyncl, YouTube's chief business officer, published in September 2017, Allocca's take on YouTube has its issues: ones known to many creators publishing videos on the platform, to viewers, and to those covering YouTube on a day-to-day basis.
For years, YouTube has been blind to its many and varied problems. It has turned the other cheek as stolen copyrighted material thrived on the site; as bullying and harassment and hate speech replicated like bacteria on a Petri dish; and as a race towards increasingly extreme content in order to chase views resulted in grave offence, serious injuries and even death.
In Kyncl's book, nearly the only admission that YouTube is anything but a harmonious place is an embarrassed, passing admission that the platform has a problem representing ethnic minorities. In Videocracy, Allocca's final analysis of the issues around the tasteless 'prank bro' culture that would eventually lead to Logan Paul uploading a video of a dead body in Japan's Aokigahara forest on New Year's Eve is: "putting aside the sometimes-unethical tactics used by pranksters, the fact that these videos have maintained such an appeal after all this time says a lot about the new aesthetic principles at play here".
There's no attempt to engage with the question about why YouTubers feel the need to use "sometimes unethical tactics" in pursuit of views; no acknowledgement that the system YouTube has created may have some part to play; and no analysis of what the effect of daily viewing of such videos may have on a large pre-teen and teenaged audience. In the time since Allocca wrote those words and the time they've been published, attitudes to YouTube have hardened. Allocca nods to this in his concluding chapter, entitled 'End Card', which seems at odds with the tone of the rest of his book, as if it was a late addition written as YouTube began to wake up to its responsibility to engage with the questions that have been posed about the site.
Until recently, precious few people outside of YouTube users and the handful of journalists covering the platform in any depth have ever thought about those questions. YouTube needs impartial heads providing careful analysis of the impact its videos and policies may have. We are now starting to get that in iterative reporting around YouTube, and will have so in my book on the platform. What Allocca provides – as well as Kyncl's earlier effort – is a hagiography: the whitewashed history of YouTube, written by YouTube itself, which addresses the question of "how YouTube is changing the world", but does so by providing only positive answers.
Kevin Allocca'sVideocracy: How YouTube Is Changing the World... with Double Rainbows, Singing Foxes, and Other Trends We Can't Stop Watching published by Bloomsbury, is out on January 25, 2018
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