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Watching YouTube: Extraordinary Videos by Ordinary People

by Michael Strangelove

Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010

In Watching YouTube, Dr. Strangelove, the Governor General Literary Award-nominated author that Wired Magazine called a ‘guru of Internet advertsing,’ describes how online digital video is both similar to and different from traditional home-movie-making and argues that we are moving into a post-television era characterized by mass participation.

Drawing from television, film, cultural, and media studies to help define an entirely new field of research, Michael Strangelove provides a broad overview of the world of amateur online videos and the people who make them.

Online practices of representation, confessional video diaries, gendered uses of amateur video, and debates over elections, religion, and armed conflicts make up the bulk of this groundbreaking study, which is supplemented by an online blog at strangelove.com/blog. An innovative and timely study, Watching YouTube raises questions about the future of cultural memory, identity, politics, warfare, and family life when everyday representational practices are altered by four billion cameras in the hands of ordinary people.

Michael Strangelove is an adjunct professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Ottawa. To find out more visit www.strangelove.com/blog.