Review by: Rapetti, Emanuele (2008-11-03)

Youtube® offers the possibility to experience the so-called “online sociality”; it has made it available to a constantly increasing number of people. Indeed, interesting experiments are being carried out also in education. (e. g.: http://it.youtube.com/user/mwesch). It is therefore pedagogically strategic to understand more deeply how this kind of socialization works.

This article presents the research of Patricia Lange, researcher at the School of Cinematic Arts, University of Southern California, concerning the “response ability” of members of a online community, like youtubers. She focuses on the “complications that emerge from interacting with other people, such as administrators, parents and participants” and the feeling of being part of a dialoguing community. The paper also presents interesting data on the “haters”-phenomenon, i. e. people mostly trying to flame other people.

The methodology adopted for the study is ethnographic: “The data includes weekly participant observation sessions on YouTube®, 50 formal interviews and pre-interview use surveys, 20 informal, video-recorded interviews, and attendance at 17 media- and video-themed events such as the YouTube® meet -up on July 7, 2007 in New York City. The study also analyzed videos, comments, and related discourse.”

The aim of the project, funded by the Mac Arthur foundation, is to deliver useful findings to inform designers of educational programs and online environments. The same results are relevant in education because both, teachers and students are often youtubers, and their online dynamics impact their lives in terms of non-formal learning experiences. Concerning e-learning, the article makes some key points about the educational use of Youtube®, presented like a community experience. These same remarks are also relevant to other e-learning situations involving the “response ability”.

First, Youtube® has a strong engagement power due to the deictic “you”: it acts like a personal invitation to be engaged and involved in a relationship that implies an “I”, like a mirror in which it is possible to look at yourself.

Second, Youtube® assumes that “everybody can upload and watch whatever he wants” – but this is not completely true: the rating system, the amount of comments and the content of responses to a video – namely, “response ability” actions – have a profound impact on participation patterns in the community. Moreover, it is important to emphasize that many commercial sites have systems that turn participation into economic gain: the ability to provoke responses is a prized internet skill. But Youtube® has to deal with copyright and ethical problems. That means – in certain cases – administrators need to close accounts and youtubers complain about this policy of “killing” online communication. So, not any kind of online communication is part of the “response ability”.

One relevant complication of participation is the gap between advanced and novice users, that the author forecasts to increase because “learning to manipulate video-equipment and computer-based editing software is expensive and non-trivial”. Jenkins defines this problem in terms of “unequal access in the world of tomorrow”.

Not least, linguists have underlined that while “response ability” is a social act etymologically connected to responsibility, there is a big lack of education to online life. Lange concludes with a useful list of questions to manage “response ability” and declares that “experience shows that when building community, passion comes with a price. As people care more about their community, they demand more and are more upset when demands are not met”.

This is an ethnographic research, and as such it does not offer definitive and statistically significant data, but opens a research direction with some really interesting issues and research questions. The main contribution of this paper is the concept of “response ability”, that is the ability to be, at the same time, a ready responder and a smart provoker of good responses. This process – both psychological and communicative – is the core of a dialoguing community and it is an effective object to study the so-called “online sociality”. While Lange does not go into detail, she suggests that this is the way to find a “you” in Youtube®: a real person behind a comment or a video-response – a person indeed able to act out her/his responsibility in that peculiar “sociality” that exists online.