"The video vortex reader is the first collection of critical texts to deal with the rapidly emerging world of online video-from its exlosive rise in 2005 with YouTube, to its future as a significant form of personal media." -- Back cover.

Michael Strangelove provides a broad overview of the world of amateur online videos and the people who make them. He 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. --from publisher description.

Video is a part of everyday life, comparable to driving a car or taking a shower. It is nearly omnipresent, available on demand and attached to nearby anything, anywhere. Online Video became something vital and independent. With all the video created by the cameras around us, constantly uploading, sharing, linking, and relating, a blue ocean is covering our planet, an ocean of video. What might look as bluish noise and dust from the far outside, might embed beautiful and fascinating living scapes of moving images, objects constantly changing, re-arranging, assembling, evolving, collapsing, but never disappearing, a real cinema. Andreas Treske describes and theorizes these objects formerly named video, their forms, behaviours and properties.

The act of creation requires us to remix existing cultural content and yet recent sweeping changes to copyright laws have criminalized the creative act as a violation of corporate rights in a commodified world. Copyright was originally designed to protect publishers, not authors, and has now gained a stranglehold on our ability to transport, read, write, teach and publish digital materials. Contrasting Western models with issues of piracy as practiced in Asia, Digital Prohibition explores the concept of authorship as a capitalist institution and posits the Marxist idea of the multitude (à la Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, and Paulo Virno) as a new collaborative model for creation in the digital age. Looking at how digital culture has transformed unitary authorship from its book-bound parameters into a collective and dispersed endeavor, Dr. Guertin examines process-based forms as diverse as blogs, Facebook, Twitter, performance art, immersive environments, smart mobs, hacktivism, tactical media, machinima, generative computer games (like Spore and The Sims) and augmented reality.

Runner-up for the British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies Best Book Prize 2015 Beyond the Screen presents an expanded conceptualization of cinema which encompasses the myriad ways film can be experienced in a digitally networked society where the auditorium is now just one location amongst many in which audiences can encounter and engage with films. The book includes considerations of mobile, web, social media and live cinema through numerous examples and case studies of recent and near-future developments. Through analyses of narrative, text, process, apparatus and audience this book traces the metamorphosis of an emerging cinema and maps the new spaces of spectatorship which are currently challenging what it means to be cinematic in a digitally networked era.

Adaptation Online: Creating Memes, Sweding Movies, and other Digital Performances explores how traditional notions of the processes and products of creative adaptation are evolving online. Using a performance lens and a shift in terminology from the metaphor of the cultural meme to the framing that adaptation affords, Lyndsay Michalik Gratch considers online adaptations in terms of creative process and human agency, rather than merely as products. This book offers a glossary of strategies for online adaptation that is useful not only for scholars in performance studies, but also for scholars of cinema, communications, and new media studies.

In the age of globalization, digitization, and media convergence, traditional hierarchies between media are breaking down. This book offers new approaches to understanding the politics and their underlying ideologies that are reshaping our global media landscape, including questions of audience participation and transmedia storytelling.

The video-sharing platform YouTube signals exciting opportunities and challenges for Shakespeare studies. As patron, distributor and archive, YouTube occasions new forms of user-generated Shakespeares, yet a reduced Bard too, subject to the distractions of the contemporary networked mediascape. This book identifies the genres of YouTube Shakespeare, interpreting them through theories of remediation and media convergence and as indices of Shakespeare's shifting cultural meanings. Exploring the intersection of YouTube's participatory culture – its invitation to 'Broadcast Yourself' – with its corporate logic, the book argues that YouTube Shakespeare is a site of productive tension between new forms of self-expression and the homogenizing effects of mass culture. Stephen O'Neill unfolds the range of YouTube's Bardic productions to elaborate on their potential as teaching and learning resources. The book importantly argues for a critical media literacy, one that attends to identity constructions and to the politics of race and gender as they emerge through Shakespeare's new media forms. Shakespeare and YouTube will be of interest to students and scholars of Shakespearean drama, poetry and adaptations, as well as to new media studies.

Remediating Sound studies the phenomena of remixing, mashup and recomposition: forms of reuse and sampling that have come to characterise much of YouTube's audiovisual content. Through collaborative composition, collage and cover songs to reaction videos and political activism , users from diverse backgrounds have embraced the democratised space of YouTube to open up new and innovative forms of sonic creativity and push the boundaries of audiovisual possibilities. Observing the reciprocal flow of influence that runs between various online platforms, 12 chapters position YouTube as a central hub for the exploration of digital sound, music and the moving image. With special focus on aspects of networked creativity that remain overlooked in contemporary scholarship, including library music, memetic media, artificial intelligence, the sonic arts and music fandom, this volume offers interdisciplinary insight into contemporary audiovisual culture.

In 2007, an unlikely troupe of 1500 Filipino prisoners became Internet celebrities after their YouTube video of Michael Jackson's ground-breaking hit 'Thriller' went viral. Taking this spectacular dance as a point of departure, Dangerous Mediations explores the disquieting development of prisoners performing punishment to a global, online audience. Combining analysis of this YouTube video with first-hand experiences from fieldwork in the Philippine prison, Áine Mangaoang investigates a wide range of interlocking contexts surrounding this user-generated text to reveal how places of punishment can be transformed into spaces of spectacular entertainment, leisure, and penal tourism. In the post-YouTube era, Dangerous Mediations sounds the call for close readings of music videos produced outside of the corporate culture industries. By connecting historical discussions on postcolonialism, surveillance and prison philosophy with contemporary scholarship on popular music, participatory culture and new media, Dangerous Mediations is the first book to ask critical questions about the politics of pop music and audiovisual mediation in early 21st-century detention centres.