Introduction

In his seminal work Television: Technology and cultural form (1974), Raymond Williams described television as a medium to be understood in its various dimensions: as a technology (‘broadcasting’), as a social practice (‘watching television’) and as a cultural form (‘programmes’). Williams deployed this multiple view of television to scaffold two broader concepts: the concept of ‘flow’ – an endless stream of concatenated programmes that glued the viewer to the screen – and the concept of ‘mobile privatization’ – referring to the way in which mass media makes mobility an endeavour that can be pursued in the privacy of one's own home, allowing people to see what happens in the world without having to leave their living room. Williams’ theory has long been held up as a model of nuanced thinking: his perspective accounted for television's technology, in both its institutional and commercial manifestations, for its social use, regarding viewers as both active and passive subjects, and he connected these two aspects to the specific forms of audiovisual content. Albeit implicitly, Williams also tied in these developments to television's regulatory, hence political, context, as he compared American commercial television to British public broadcasting service (the BBC).

Williams, in 1974, could have never predicted the emergence of a novel ‘tube’ thirty years later. When YouTube was introduced in 2005, the media landscape was still dominated by television. The new platform that allowed people to share their self-produced videos online, was conceived in a Silicon Valley garage by Chad Hurley and his friends. Even if the technology was not as revolutionary as broadcast television was in the early 1950s, YouTube rapidly developed into the biggest user-generated content (UGC) platform available on the web 2.0. Five years after its start, YouTube, now a subsidiary of Google Inc., is the third most popular internet site in the world, boasting two billion videos a day and attracting ‘nearly double the prime-time audience of all three major US television networks combined’. Millions of users contribute and watch self-made videos, short TV-clips, music trailers, compilations, etc. on a daily basis. In a very short time, YouTube has become a significant presence in the global media landscape.

Evidently, Raymond Williams’ theory far predates YouTube's emergence, and yet his basic model for understanding a novel media phenomenon is still useful today as a starting point.