Perhaps Youtube's greatest contributions are the unmeasurable ones. And here we can think of niche, micro-communities that may find what they want on the site -- or use it to help figure out what they want -- without catapulting it to Youtube super stardom. If Juhasz speaks of the necessary mediocrity of YouTube's success stories, they are surely not exclusive to the medium. The very American obsession with the measurable -- box office, Top 40 charts -- can blind us from considering these more discrete, "small" victories that the site can serve as host to. To take the academic world as an analogy: huge undergrad lectures may bring in so much cash to universities so they can afford to have niche discussion classes with four students. The bacchanalia of mediocrity clogging Youtube may be not so nasty a price for us to pay if we can abstract it from the cracks it still leaves for us to fill with non-mediocre usage.
The issue of representability is at stake here. Little does it matter if an under-represented youth, for example, watching someone "like them" is also watching a through-the-roof count or star system beneath the video. We already know, from the symbolic values inherited from non-YouTube worlds how much we are worth. Our victories probably lie in creative "filling" of these cracks, circumventing their mathematical logic of measurable accomplishment altogether. And shouldn't we be glad, as scholars, that so much mediocrity is made so accessible as object of study, so needy of our probing gaze, so deep in its hypertextuality and the traces that its authors leave.
And if there is a policing that constrains the extent of these 'victories', could there be a way to think of Xtube or an Xtube-esque environment as more adequate for non-mediocre fare? Even Xtube, however, seems to block videos featuring certain kinds of kink, namely scat.
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