Dissertation Blog #5 - A Little About My Proposal

As the video already explains, my proposal has been submitted and I’m happy with what I produced. I was fortunate to discover as many sources as I did, as I didn’t expect there to be much literature on something as young and as alien as YouTube.

The story of YouTube; one of community and collaboration is one which first requires a good understanding of sociology, and through reading what’s been available to me; Sociology on the Web: A Student Guide by Stuart Stein, Sociology in the age of the Internet by Allison Cavanagh, Researching Sociology on the Internet by D. R. Wilson, I’ve already created a foundation on which to build upon. Connection is what people crave; it’s what the human race is all about. Language is a product of our need for connection. We are in constant need of companionship, romance, instruction, development, all the demands that motivate us as human beings and so we created roads and communities, big and small, and now we’ve created YouTube and its fellow web 2.0 behemoths to fulfil our needs more effectively than ever before. We are the social animal par excellence.

The 2008 Presidential election is a subject in which I have great interest. Many believe Barack Obama won the presidency because of a more internet-savvy campaign than McCain’s. It makes sense, making use of YouTube and social networks would be the best way to attract younger voters, but I’d like to research and discover how true these claims are. I’ve begun to read the University of Massachusetts Journal of Information Technology and Politics, titled YouTube and the 2008 Election Cycle in the United States; in addition I’ve collected books by Michael Rush and William Dutton to improve my general knowledge of politics.

Dissertation Blog #4 - Coming Back with Confidence

Goodness gracious, how I've neglected this blog recently!


My dissertation's progression came to a halt a few weeks ago when my ideas were essentially shot down. 'The Ethics of Journalism and Advertising in Web 2.0' was too clumsy a title, the title 'Is Web 2.0 Threatening Traditional Print Media?' was too typical and had been done too many times already.


The advice given to me was essentially "back to the drawing board."


So I pondered for a few days but to little avail, until I was on the train returning to uni having been home for a few days. I had an hour to kill, so I wrote down some questions in my notebook;


"What do I want to write about?" 
I answered, "YouTube."

"What about [chosen subject] do you want to discuss?" 
"It's effect on our society, culture and politics; how it's changed our way of communicating and our view of the world around us, particularly amongst people of my generation, as we're the first generation of the internet."


And that's all I needed to tell myself, and I am happy to say my current and hopefully final dissertation title is "The Social, Cultural and Political Impacts of YouTube on Generation Y"


I'm very happy. I love how I've come back to the original idea that I wanted to write about YouTube and not all of web 2.0. It's the website I love and know so much about. I love that this dissertation will require research related to internet culture, sociology, the history of the internet, political science and maybe even philosophy. It's exciting.


I've already found valuable sources for my work. One being Patrick Vonderau and Pelle Snickars' The YouTube Reader. This book tackles a variety of topics on YouTube, all of which I can take advantage of. I've also discovered a man named Andrew Keen, an author known for his strong concerns that YouTube is a contribution to destruction of our culture and the authority of experts. I'm searching for as much of his work as possible before I purchase his book, The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet Is Killing Our Culture. Given that there are many other critcs like Keen who's work I'll uncover, I've now found a good argument worth discussing in my piece, whether or not the impacts of YouTube are good for my generation.


No video to accompany this blog, there will be next time however. What's important though, is that I feel good about this dissertation now.

Dissertation Blog #3 - Blogs, Bloggers and the Whole World of Blogging

Ethics is no longer the basis of my dissertation.

WHAT?

Last Monday I attended my regular E-Publishing seminar, in which fellow students and I discuss “the nature of electronic publishing and electronically published material, looking at the range, type, and style of e-published materials.” This particular week we discussed blogs, bloggers and the whole world of blogging. We discussed the pros and cons of blogging over print media and whether or not blogging could be considered a threat to print media, which is when little bells began to ring in my head. The question “Does blogging and microblogging mark the end of traditional print journalism?” evolved very quickly, I went to research my question further, and was surprised with how much information was available and how genuinely interested I was in the subject.

HOW?

The joy that is Google Scholar, I’ve found many texts relating journalism and blogging thanks to Google Scholar - Weblogs and Journalism: Do They Connect? by Rebecca Blood and Is Blogging Journalism? by Paul Andrews were both good starting points, and I’ve also taken out some books from the library recently, as shown in the video.  

WHY?

Before this academic year began, I’d never blogged before, nor had I ever been subscribed to a blog, so I thought my knowledge in blogging would’ve been no greater than the next person, but while discussing blogs and further researching blogs, I realised the information was completely relative to the world of video blogs which, as previously mentioned, I know well, so in many ways I feel like I’m coming full circle. While I’ve turned my back on ethics being my primary subject, it’ll be more than possible to weave it into discussion, will weblog journalism be more or less ethical than print media? In online journalism, advertising is likely to be a point of discussion, as freelancers cannot make money from blogging otherwise, so how does that affect the publisher’s content? Does that have any particular affect on the readers and their perception of journalism? For now these questions shall remain unanswered, but they’ve helped me in making things clearer now and I’m confident I’ll have a proper title for my dissertation by the time of my next entry. Fourth week in, and the pressure is slowly building and my nerves are increasing. The size of this project is becoming more obvious and intimidating, but I have no choice but to see this as a good thing.

Dissertation Blog #2 - A Question of Ethics?

From now on, my videos will be scripted beforehand, I promise!


As I say in the video, I've begun to wonder whether it's possible or not to discuss both journalism and advertising within web 2.0, providing they are branches of a different topic, and yes, last week I was speaking exclusively about YouTube, and while my dissertation will still concentrate on YouTube, I think there's no avoiding discussing Twitter and Facebook. The way I see it at the moment, if I were to write about ethics within web 2.0 then I could write about journalism and advertising as sub-topics. Having said that, I wouldn't be able to write in great detail about journalism and advertising in case of going too far off topic.


This whole way of thinking has derived from the only useful text which I've read this week, and that's Ethical Space - The International Journal of Communication Ethics. Typically, I didn't even find it, I received the link via email (Thanks, Andy.) Below is only a small section of what led me to think differently about my dissertation; 

"When Iraq’s former President Saddam Hussein was executed in late 2006, news media in many
countries rushed to put images of him on their front pages and at the tops of their bulletins. As
well as exposing the West’s double standards about images of dead people and its misunderstandings
of the cultures it seeks to control, those shocking images highlighted the media’s obsession
with commercial ratings and circulation battles. Perhaps they also expressed the media’s need to
mark symbolically what had been achieved in America’s invasion of Iraq.
But in every account of Hussein’s death we could devise, consideration of the Internet’s global
reach and power will loom large, and ethics will lag far behind. As the media commentator
Professor Roy Greenslade noted, the news media were rushing to play catch up with social
networking sites such as YouTube, where cell phone images of the execution were circulating
almost before news editors and media relations teams had caught up with the event. ‘The raw
information had circumvented the traditional instruments of control,’ wrote Guardian reporter
Dan Glaister."


It's a thought, anyway.


Bibliography


Matheson, D., 2007. Why ethics should be at the heart of the Internet debate, Ethical Space – The Internet Journal of Communication Ethics

Dissertation Blog #1 - The Beginning of the End

Many people would have expected a blog from me last weekend, the first in a series of blogs chronicling the first steps in writing my dissertation. Those people were sadly disappointed - I never posted my first blog. Blame the Ryder Cup and Wales' unpredictable weather, that's what I'm doing anyway.

Major sporting events are no longer a distraction, so my dissertation from now on will have my full attention.

After the two hour lecture last Friday, I felt that I was one of the only students who had more than an inkling as to what my dissertation would be about. In the broadest of broad senses, my dissertation is going to be about YouTube. I could write about journalism and its relation to YouTube, that being more relevant to my degree, but I could also write about advertising on YouTube, something at first I think has more content to discuss in detail, though I may be wrong. It's over these next few weeks that I hope to specify my title.

Why YouTube, though? Well, YouTube is my second life and has been for the last four years. I am in every sense a ‘YouTuber’, someone who is part of a social community consisting of other YouTubers; we post videos to one another, ask each other questions, respond to each others’ queries, help each other out in increasing viewership in hopes of securing a YouTube partnership. It sounds weird from an outsider’s perspective, but it’s surprising how engaging this world can be. In thinking of writing a 10,000 word essay about YouTube, I feel obliged to bring the YouTube community into my project; ask them for their opinions and thoughts, be it through comments, tweets or video responses, so I have opened a new account where I’ll post videos discussing my dissertation under the pseudonym Oliver Oakdale. 

I apologise for my lack of ability to write creatively, I hope that will improve over the coming weeks. I’ll stop now before I begin to bore us all.