YouTube Storytelling

“Today the mass audience …can be used as a creative, participating force.” (McLuhan, p.22) This is seen in the YouTube Story Project. This type of collaboration blurs the concept of authorship. It is not the creator/s that matter but rather the process of creation, working together, or against each other. Jenkins mentions that “the most powerful content on YouTube comes from and is taken up by specific communities of practice and is thus in that sense a form of cultural collaboration.” (Henry Jenkins blog)

This idea of group storytelling corresponds back to Weight’s ‘trilogue’. “The trilogue blurs the distinction between ‘author’ and text’. So long as the apparatus itself is one of the active trilogical partners in textual performance, authorship ‘bleeds out’ from the programmer, and becomes an aspect of the ‘ontology’ of the text-as-apparatus itself.” (Weight, p.421) When the apparatus is employed notions of authorship blur, it is not just the ‘programmer/s’ that create the text but also the apparatus. Hence, authorship seeps out between each programmer and their machine. There is no single creator/programmer on the Internet. By facilitating collaborative projects we become more aware of the trilogical nature of creation.