WEEK 5. WEBSITE ANALYSIS A/B

a) How is your chosen site structured.

Youtube is generated primarily from user constructed content. Anyone with recording facilities (as basic as a web camera, or basic software like Windows movie maker that allows images to be pasted together in a movie sequence), can put content on YouTube. The content of videos posted ranges from Officially posted music videos, vlogs, home videos, amateur films and many more; an exhaustative list would be impossible.
The site is strongly hypertextual; links in comments are made to certain points of the video, links to the posters’ other videos, to users’ profiles, their videos, their favourite videos, related videos, external websites etc etc. You can seemingly click forever and keep finding information and videos never seen before. I certainly find myself doing this for hours without meaning to.
Users can create profiles where they can personalise this space; fill in a small personal profile, link to their own videos, to favourite videos, subscribe to favourites and ‘friends’ and change the background and colour of their page. Users can also publicly comment on videos, rate them out of 5, rate comments made and send private messages to other users. Compared to other websites of similar popularity, I would say these functions are fairly simple/basic; there is little complexity in the structure of the site.


b) What is it about on a cultural level?

Culturally, youTube is centered around produserism and about publishing a variety of cultural products. The vastness of the material on youtube means that not only items of popular culture can be found but many more obscure and alternative music, films and opinions can be found. Culturally also should be noted that users often take popular culture music/films etc and edit these to create their own meaning. It also provides an area for global communication in the form of commenting on videos, or even making video responses.