In this special issue of Enculturation, we invited scholars to explore the ubiquity of video and participatory cultures. We started our own investigation into this theme in a panel presentation, “YouTube U.: Home Video Goes to College” at the Conference on College Composition and Communication in New Orleans in 2008. In our work, we considered the limitations of viewing YouTube merely as a broadcasting platform and argued that YouTube should be regarded within the context of an ever-changing and growing networked ecology.

Arguments over the relative value of participatory cultures have tracked the explosion in digital cultures in the past decade or so, and a common target of such arguments is the video hosting site, YouTube. YouTube’s popularity and reach has grown exponentially since its founding in 2005, and serious concerns have been raised about participatory culture as exemplified by YouTube and its connections to everything from violence, copyright violation, and insipid narcisism to government, business, and education.

Over the last decade the crisis in scholarly publication has become as familiar a topic in English Studies as the national decline in undergraduate majors and the disappearance of tenure-track positions. Increasing demands for publication for tenure and promotion have combined with shrinking markets, particularly for monographs. The emergence of online journals has relieved some of those pressures, even though the scholarly reputation of those journals has been slow to improve. More recently, university presses have begun to move to electronic publishing.

A version of this essay was first given at Brown University in December 2009 as a talk for the animating archives conference. This version 2.0, for online publication via Enculturation, similarly addresses, but in this journal’s specific format and forum, what remains, for me, the perennial writing question behind my project (teaching, writing, and learning about YouTube on YouTube or at minimum online): how to best use the multimedia of (re)presentation to translate an online experience and analysis, in particular one often spoken on video on and about YouTube.

A renewed interest in reciprocal exchange has appeared in the realm of digital environments and interaction. In the past, scholars observed that cooperation, helping practices, and reciprocal behaviors such as exchanging software code or providing feedback on creative works were often advantageous to online groups of dispersed individuals who share certain interests.

In The Wealth of Networks, Yochai Benkler argues that the affordances of new media result in a shift in patterns of human behavior; people in a “networked information economy” assume a digitally creative life, unencumbered by cost or “alien bureaucracy” (137). Evidence of this digitally creative life is apparent from even a cursory glance at YouTube, Facebook, Flickr and even Twitter. And there are copious networked sites that are less prominent, such as Leak.live, Stickam, ebaumsworld, Revver, Dailymotion, Vimeo and Tumblr.

Gregory L. Ulmer argues that when the media packages messages about disasters, it often creates a situation where post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) becomes the defining condition of contemporary identity. The disasters are not outside the system of progress but are a crucial part of the system. If we did not filter out, or mythologize, the disasters' contradictory relationships with progress, and the centrality of sacrifice in this process, we would quickly become overwhelmed. Ulmer suggests considering this essential aspect of sacrifice-dependent progress as a Y choice that allows one to realize that there is another choice.

Drawing on the work of Erving Goffman, I demonstrate how significations of vulnerability foster rhetorical transactions in video networks and, consequently, how these transactions constitute a video vernacular, the knowledge of which can lead to a more robust rhetorical heuristic of video and participatory culture.

No longer exclusive to industry, now residing at the fingertips of the masses, our media and media production landscapes are changing. We are moving out of the longstanding, industrial-based consumerist culture and into a culture that is increasingly one of digital consumer-producers, or what we might view as an emerging culture industry by the masses for the masses.1 And as we both consume and produce in this new landscape, and do so at rates and degrees never before seen, we find ourselves in the midst of a radical reculturalization: we are moving away from the blinding/binding spectacle of the "big screen" (Virilio),2 and moving toward more participatory logics and rhetorics of the "small screen," the computer screen, a new breed of interactive spectacle.