Visual Epidemic

I am writing up something interesting reported from my parkour informants which dovetails nicely with Grussin’s theory of the ‘YouTube sublime’ Accoring to Grussin, the YouTube sublime is the idea that the  number of videos is almost too large to comprehend (The YouTube Reader, 2009). I began this research looking for communities of practice within the YouTube larger community. While I still hold that these exist and that a sense of community (in the Rheingoldian sense) is strong in these communities, the Parkour group I interviewed reported YouTube not as a community enhancer or builder, rather as a searchable platform which allowed them to contact others in their *local* area to come together to train. In other words, YouTube was a way to build a local community. Furthermore, once this community of parkour practitioners was established, they reported finding no further use for YouTube. This may not be surprising given that parkour is situated so much in the physical, yet the level of interactivity on parkour videos makes me wonder about this disconnect between what my informants report feeling and what a rough social network analysis shows. Maybe this would be a good way to compare offline and online communities of practice – but again, maybe this would be an unfair comparison due to the focus on the physical of parkour.This relates to the YouTube sublime in that this group also understands the platform as a large resource rather than a community/social platform. This is just one of several groups we will study in our YAPA project. We will also look at a group using YouTube politically, and a flashmob group. I am very curious to see if this pattern repeats itself in other communities of practice.

In: Uncategorized | tags: 60posts, parkour, YouTube. | #