Above: 9JUGS (L-R Jack, Bekah, Jamie, Kim, Katie, Nikki, Francesca, Amber and Claire) meeting in the Bute Building to discuss our research and ideas
This week Nikki and I have been investigating the extent to which YouTube has previously been studied by academics. We were quite surprised by the number of journal articles that we found about YouTube, as there were more than we had expected. The aspects of YouTube that had been written about by academics included the role of YouTube in coverage of the Iraq war, and use of the website by politicians in order to reach a young audience. However, when we looked at examples of Media Studies textbooks used by students, we found that the
research that had been carried out into Youtube had not really been brought into the classroom. Even the most recent Media textbooks featured very little discussion of Youtube, and several members of our study group who had studied Media at A Level or GCSE noted that YouTube had not been part of their syllabus. We felt that perhaps this was because YouTube's cultural importance and role in today's changing media landscape continues to be overlooked by many; it is not seen as a particularly worthy or valid subject for academic study. Our group disagrees with this, and we would argue that such a huge cultural phenomenon as Youtube shouldn't be ignored by media scholars or those who teach young people about the media.
Interestingly, we discovered that a course in YouTube Studies got underway in 2007 at Pitzer College in the US:
http://www.pitzer.edu/news_center/in_the_news/07-08-academic_year/2007_09-04_highered_youtube.asp
We think it would be great if more schools and universities considered running modules such as this, which take Youtube seriously and encourage students to look at the site, its limitations and its significance from a critical and academic point of view.
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