Please summarize the main central points and argument of the article- "Unruly publics and the fourth estate on YouTube" in simple to understand English. Bullet points are fine.
Page 594 . Volume 8, Issue 2 November 2011 Unruly publics and the fourth estate on YouTube Luke Goode, Alexis McCullough & Gelise O'Hare University of Auckland, Aotearoa/New Zealand Abstract It is now commonly claimed that new online platforms have made news more participatory, more of a ‘conversation’ than a ‘lecture’. Mainstream news outlets, though in principle keen to capitalise on new opportunities for engagement with audiences, are often tentative in the steps they take in this direction. Various commercial risks, as well as opportunities, are associated with linking branded content to the frequently rancorous and hostile arenas of online conversation. This paper looks at the example of YouTube, a notoriously unruly and uncivil conversational domain, and explores some of the textures and facets of conversational participation by audiences now being staged within the official branded channels of established mainstream news outlets. Combining analysis of comment threads with theoretical reflections on the nature and function of online conversation spaces such as that provided by YouTube, this paper considers the value of such spaces for the outlet, for audiences and for the public sphere at large. Keywords: YouTube, news, public sphere. Introduction – YouTube and the Public Sphere In a 2008 report entitled ‘The Flattening of Politics’, YouTube’s news and political editor, Steve Grove, sketched out some of the benefits for mainstream news organisations that embrace the new ‘political ecosystem’ of the social media sphere (2008). A number of outlets including CNN, the BBC, Fox News, The New York Times, The Guardian, Associated Press and Reuters have YouTube channels, some providing more extensive content archives than others. There are, of course, strategic and commercial risks for media organisations that don’t engage with this dominant new platform. The issue is not merely one of heightening an outlet’s visibility in today’s hyper-competitive attention economy but is also one of control: media outlets routinely find their content circulating round social networks unofficially in any case and there may be compelling reasons (rights management challenges notwithstanding) to provide such content on an official, branded and advertising-supported basis. But the benefits of engagement that Grove lauds are simultaneously commercial and Volume 8, Issue 2 November 2011 Page 595 civic. Political campaigners, NGOs and interest groups have found, via YouTube and other online social networks, unprecedented opportunities to connect directly with the citizens their messages are tailored towards (and, as a by-product, with new non-target audiences). So too, Grove argues, mainstream media organisations—far from being rendered redundant in this increasingly unfiltered communications environment—have an important role to play in shaping what he describes as 'the world’s largest town hall for political discussion’. Whilst much has been made of the ‘wisdom of the crowd’ acting in a kind of ‘Fifth Estate’ role (Cooper, 2006)—be it citizen journalists ‘scooping’ the Fourth Estate with immediate eyewitness footage, or bloggers who take apart the biases, omissions and factual inaccuracies of mainstream media reports—still, or perhaps more than ever, ‘citizens desperately need the Fourth Estate to provide depth, context and analysis that only comes with experience and the sharpening of the craft’ (Grove, 2008). We might also append to this list of professional media virtues citizens’ dependency on the resources (labour, technology, access credentials etc.) of mainstream media. Unsurprisingly, Grove does not rehearse the risks that mainstream media may face in venturing into this relatively low-cost/high-reach medium, be it the risks of cannibalising traditional revenue streams or, significantly, exposing a media brand to a forum for unmoderated—and notoriously uncivil—public discussion. Grove is of course interested in promoting a positive vision of YouTube's conversational qualities in order to attract media buy-in: it is conversation that promises to improve the 'stickiness' of the YouTube platform, giving advertisers better access to users who will stay longer and return more often to particular channels. For Grove, the strategic paradigm for communications professionals has shifted in the era of online social networks from a linear one of dissemination towards an interactive one based on participation. Here the issue becomes one of how various agents (be they candidates, lobby groups or news organisations) ‘get their … messages into the conversation’ (Grove, 2008). Grove is drawing on a trope that has now become commonplace in discussions of news in the digital age. Dan Gillmor (2004) is one particularly influential commentator on the rise of citizen journalism who has argued forcefully that, in the twenty-first century, news has become less akin to a ‘lecture’ and more akin to a ‘conversation’. The implications for those in professional journalism who fail to heed this flattening and ostensibly democratising shift are ominous. But the term ‘conversation’ itself risks being conceptually flattened. Not all conversations are of equal quality or civic value and the conversations that play out on YouTube are often perceived as an outlet for anger, boredom, semi-literacy and self-publicity rather than civil deliberation. This stereotypical (which is not to say wholly unfounded) image of YouTube as a medium with a low signal-to- noise ratio is underscored by the attempts that owners Google have made to introduce tools (such as spam markers and comments ratings) to improve that ratio. A third party tool available as a Firefox browser extension called ‘YouTube Comment Snob’, which allows users to set tolerance thresholds for bad spelling, profanity, all-caps and excessive punctuation, neatly exemplifies the dubious reputation YouTube has acquired. Volume 8, Issue 2 November 2011 Page 596 Grove's positive view of YouTube’s conversational qualities is contested not only within the end-user community but also by many social media professionals. Consider, as an exemplar, the views of Senior Vice-President (Digital Strategy) of PR firm Ogilvy Worldwide. In a blog post entitled ‘Why Brands Should Skip the “Conversation” on YouTube’ Rohit Bhargava draws a stark contrast between the genuinely valuable conversations of the Web 2.0 environment at large and the debased racism, swearing and ‘idiotic’ conversations of YouTube specifically: In every other medium, from blogs to microsites to forums, comments are great. They invite conversation and offer a chance for dialogue... Look at most blogs, and the comments will likely add to the dialogue. That's not the case on YouTube, and I think we are all noticing it… For some reason, commenting on videos encourages stupidity. (2007) His recommended strategies of moderating or disabling comments on YouTube also carry risks, though, especially perhaps for commercial media outlets whereby accusations of censorship can be highly problematic for brand reputation. The dilemmas faced here can be rather starkly exemplified by the case of Al Jazeera English, which disables comments on a large number of its YouTube videos. The following thread on one of their comments- enabled videos illustrates a double bind: the risks of frustrating viewers’ Fifth Estate aspirations and the risks of opening up the channel, thereby exposing the brand to the kind of debasement of which some social media marketers warn: In search of a more discriminating perspective, scholarly analysis of the conversational qualities of new media spaces is often framed (explicitly or implicitly) by a Habermasian Volume 8, Issue 2 November 2011 Page 597 'public sphere' ethos (Habermas, 1989). The temptation is to weigh up the potential that interactive spaces like YouTube provide for civic and deliberative dialogue against the messier realities of the communication actually occurring. Analysing YouTube according to such a normative yardstick, it is liable to be found seriously wanting. Terms like ‘deliberation’ and ‘dialogue’ suggest, among other things, an orientation towards turn- taking and the mutual quest for an overlap between ‘horizons of understanding’ (if not necessarily consensus). But these norms are, of course, generated a priori rather than discerned empirically.1 Investigating how YouTube ‘conversations’ operate beyond the normative boundaries of the public sphere ethos, though, does not compel us towards uncritical description (less still, populist celebration) of their alterity and resistance to singular normative frameworks. It may well be valuable to seek to understand such incontinent new media spaces as ‘heterotopias’ (after Foucault, 1967) rather than as Habermasian ‘public spheres’ (see, for example, Haider and Sundin, 2010). Yet the fact is that many people remain keenly interested in (and invest hope and energy in) the civic potentials of new media forums such as YouTube. This includes many journalists and other news professionals but also many YouTube users themselves as the thread excerpted above exemplifies. Just as historians have brought out the more ‘feral’ qualities of the historical public spheres overly idealised in Habermas’s own work without throwing the baby out with the bathwater (see Calhoun, 1992), so too we can investigate the public sphere afforded by YouTube in the context of (rather than as subsumed by) its complex, contradictory and somewhat chaotic textures. Our approach in this paper is, then, to contribute to a ‘thickening out’ (in Clifford Geertz's [1973: 3-30] anthropological sense) of the idea of the public sphere in order to add to the stock of more realistic insights into the nature and civic implications of the conversations playing out on YouTube. The premise for this approach is our qualified agreement with a leading anthropologist of online social networks in her observation that ‘Given the scholarly attention to civic publics, it is often hard to remember that people participate in public life for other reasons; identity development, status negotiation, community maintenance, and so on’ (boyd, 2008: 243). Our agreement is qualified by the obverse observation that it is also necessary to remember that people often participate in social media spaces for civic reasons and not merely