Geert Lovink argues in his article, “The Art of Watching Databases,” that with the advent of YouTube we now watch databases of endless short clips that accommodate our short attention span.
Lev Manovich, in “The Practice of Everyday (Media) Life” argues that there has been a gradual shift within the media allowing for more communication and an increased in nonprofessional producers.
Both articles look at the effect of the rapid growth of social media sites such as YouTube. Manovich discusses how users make ‘remixes' of different content from different sources. He talks about how industries now create designs that are intended to be customized by users. Companies, like Google, want users to contribute to their site. They make money by collecting data from users. For this reason they want as many users as possible to visit social media sites such as YouTube. They give users unlimited storage space allowing them to post as much as they want. This creates the massive amounts of clips found in the databases that Lovink discusses in his article. YouTube’s clip chain that continues forever provides users with an endless supply of videos. This endlessly branching database, Manovich argues is site of millions of conversations taking place at the same time. Users add comments or videos in response to other videos creating a conversation between users. This allows artists to be more easily influenced by each other as they respond to each others’ work as they produce their own art.
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