The YouTube Reader

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.

Pelle Snickars is head of research at the Swedish National Library in Stockholm. Patrick Vonderau is an assistant professor in the Department of Media Studies at Ruhr University, Germany.