The economy of youtube

The youtube economy, from my craven and over-sexualized perspective, runs on the male gaze. A male-gaze economy powers youtube posts and posters. The comment and rate function of youtube provide a digital-substantial datum, which becomes the machine's way to establish your popularity.

That's the point. Popularity is an abstract concept. It should be. I want to be surprised when I find myself drawn to a personality and I share that preoccupation with others, many many others. The machine has turned this into a likert-type intensity scale representing popularity. The youtubers recognize this and they'll post things just to race the popularity bar. Looking at the number of times one's video is viewed, viewer comments, and current rating comprise popularity. Youtubers also recognizing the ways to 'hack' popularity, and women from adolescence through adulthood show some skin, some leg, some cleavage, mouth, eyeballs, ears, hair, clothing, shapes, sounds. In high definition it takes on a measure of tactility. One poster to a website I frequent recommends watching a video of a girl that she posted in 1080, which is a measure of screen resolution. Screen resolution is how many dots of a light responsive medium per inch cover the screen. In the olden days these were standardized via scan lines. Enterprising girls go for high definition video recorders in order to amplify their presence, and they show some skin, some leg, some cleavage, dancing or lip-syncing prowess, mouth, braces, eyeballs, ears, hair, clothing, shapes, sounds. Most of this is done to copyrighted music produced by a conglomerate of media and marketing companies looking to create a credible platform upon which they can populate a series of products.

A Miley Cyrus product represents a global operation of marketing and machine-made products, transported, and sold to the market comprised mostly of young girls who are enchanted by her. Billions of dollars are expended upon the image pursued in owning the product. This filters through your youtube screen as the prospect of 'making it' via one's youtube video posts motivate the content of the videos. "I have something to show you. I want to show you my presence before you and how 'cool' or 'good' at something I can be. And I want you to rate me on my performance or some little miscellaneous detail that you approved of. I'll do almost anything for your positivity."

I reiterate that a male-gaze economy powers youtube. Through it images become currency. The diversity and character of this gaze is represented in the diversity of videos, which exist currently on youtube. Granted that the sheer mass of any media content in an information based society is already accounted for, we can study this. By addressing the mass of information we read it like tea leaves for poignant signs through which we cast our lot.

Over and over and over again in a self-reflexive world where cameras become mirrors onto the public nature of our everyday lives. Communication, the great leveler, flattens our image qua data to that of a celebrity, and we achieve parity with the famous in an online world. This parity is only an information access accomplishment but it is a powerful motivator for racing fame. Because racing fame is a generator built into the sites that we frequent and the ways that we've conceded to relating to one another.