Pelle Snickars Knihy

YouTube has come to epitomize the possibilities of digital culture. With more than seventy million unique users a month and approximately eighty million videos online, this brand-name video distribution platform holds the richest repository of popular culture on the Internet. As the fastest growing site in the history of the Web, YouTube promises endless new opportunities for amateur video, political campaigning, entertainment formats, and viral marketing—a clip culture that has seemed to outpace both cinema and television.The YouTube Reader is the first full-length book to explore YouTube as an industry, archive, and cultural form. This remarkable volume brings together renowned film and media scholars to debate the problems and potential of "broadcasting yourself." The YouTube Reader takes on claims of newness, immediacy, and popularity with sytematic and theoretically informed arguments, offering a closer look at the available texts on YouTube and the policies and norms that govern their access and use.Contributors include Christopher Anderson, Thomas Elsaesser, Richard Grusin, Bernard Stiegler, Toby Miller, Lisa Parks, William Uricchio, and Janet Wasko.

Beyond newspapers, television, and social networks, media are the means by which any information is shared, from antique graffiti to playlists on Spotify. Cultures are held together as much by bookkeeping and records as they are by stories and myths. From Big Bang to Big Data shows how every society has been a media society, in its own way.

An innovative investigation of the inner workings of Spotify that traces the transformation of audio files into streamed experience. Spotify provides a streaming service that has been welcomed as disrupting the world of music. Yet such disruption always comes at a price. Spotify Teardown contests the tired claim that digital culture thrives on disruption. Borrowing the notion of “teardown” from reverse-engineering processes, in this book a team of five researchers have playfully disassembled Spotify's product and the way it is commonly understood. Spotify has been hailed as the solution to illicit downloading, but it began as a partly illicit enterprise that grew out of the Swedish file-sharing community. Spotify was originally praised as an innovative digital platform but increasingly resembles a media company in need of regulation, raising questions about the ways in which such cultural content as songs, books, and films are now typically made available online. Spotify Teardown combines interviews, participant observations, and other analyses of Spotify's “front end” with experimental, covert investigations of its “back end.” The authors engaged in a series of interventions, which include establishing a record label for research purposes, intercepting network traffic with packet sniffers, and web-scraping corporate materials. The authors' innovative digital methods earned them a stern letter from Spotify accusing them of violating its terms of use; the company later threatened their research funding. Thus, the book itself became an intervention into the ethics and legal frameworks of corporate behavior.