The three founders of YouTube had no idea at the time of its creation that a video-sharing platform originally created for an online dating service would later have such an impact on society and the market. YouTube is the second most visited website and now owned by Google, it has expanded from a website to a mobile app. YouTube, like other audiovisual platforms, delivers content to its users in the form of streams, but the difference is that most of the content on YouTube is generated by individual users. As a result, the videos output on YouTube has influenced pop culture as well as internet trends as the user base continues to grow.

Short, quirky audio-visual videos, which are not technically sophisticated or in high definition, have been posted and have received a huge number of views, attracting other YouTube users to imitate similar content and export new content, resulting in a growing volume of quirky and funny audio-visual videos on YouTube, which are becoming popular. Vernallis, therefore, calls YouTube an unruly medium and seeks to derive YouTube aesthetic taxonomies (Rogers, 2014).

Vernallis classifies YouTube videos such as these two above as Repetition. The main characteristic of this type of video is that it will select content material that fits with current aesthetic trends and user practice experiences and repeat the content repeatedly (Vernallis,2013). For example, in the two examples above, both videos were created using popular internet memes, cartoon kitten and rage comic images. These two genres are repeated over and over again in the video’s content and are accompanied by dynamic music to make them interesting and attractive.

The video above is titled ‘Donald Trump And Barack Obama Singing Barbie Girl. As former presidents of the United States, Donald Trump and Barack Obama are surely not singing this song themselves. In fact, there is no connection between the images and sounds that appear in the video, the content has been edited and synthesized by the publisher. The publisher has tried to increase the continuity between each image and synchronize the sound and images as much as possible to give the impression that the two men are actually singing. This production feature, combined with the specificity of the main characters in the video, has made it a firm catch for viewers. To date, the video has been viewed 27.8 million times on YouTube and has almost 40,000 comments. Vernallis classifies this kind of YouTube video as Image/Sound Discontinuity(2013).

Although Vernallis attempts to categorize YouTube aesthetics, it is not systematic; YouTube, as a platform for sharing videos with an ever-growing number of users and expanding content, is likely to produce new aesthetic categories at any time. The above examples and categories of video aesthetics are only a sample of what currently exists.

Edit By: Yuxia Shen(33738765)

References:

Carol Vernallis (2013), “YouTube Aesthetics”, in: Unruly Media, New York: Oxford University Press, 127-154.

Carol Vernallis (2013), “Accelerated Aesthetics: A New Lexicon of Time, Space and Rhythm”, in: Unruly Media, New York: Oxford University Press, 277-288.

Rogers, H.O.L.L.Y. (2014) “Carol Vernallis, Unruly Media: YouTube, music video, and the New Digital Cinema (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), ISBN: 978-0-199-76699-4 (HB), 978-0-199-76700-7 (PB). – John Richardson, an eye for music: Popular Music and the Audiovisual Surreal (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), ISBN: 978-0-195-36736-2 (HB), 978-0-195-36737-9 (PB).,” Twentieth-Century Music, 11(2), pp. 308–314. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1017/s1478572214000127.