Blurring Boundaries? YouTube as Informal Organisational Practice

1. Blurring Boundaries?YouTube as Informal Organisational Practice Emma Bell Keele University Pauline Leonard University of Southampton

2. Social media and changing organizational practices • Web 2.0 and participatory culture • ‘Bottom up’ nature of digital culture- organizations are variously seen as: • “uninvited crashers to the web 2.0 party” (Fournier and Avery 2011) • enjoyable targets of critique and parody • However (economic) potential of social media enormously attractive for organisations

3. Social media and the blurring of boundaries • Challenging organizational practices, positions and identities • Changing individual work performances and practices: who does what, when and how • Opening up of communicative flows and power • New forms of social and cultural capital by which to compete

4. You Tube as a Site of Informal Organization • Founded in June 2005 as a delivery platform to enable rapid (viral) online video sharing of film • In October 2006 acquired by Google for $1.65 billion; by 2008, in top ten most visited internet sites • Success arises from social relationships and creative modes of expression that the technology enables (user as consumer and producer) • Participatory culture involving digital technologies in creation and circulation of content in ways that blurs boundaries between established commercial relationship between media industries and consumers (Burgess and Green, 2009) • Vernacular character – ‘home-madeness’, intertextuality and parody • ‘The three A’s’ : amateurism, authenticity and affinity

5. Organisational authenticity • Impressions of authenticity is of particular importance in the creative industries (Peterson 1997, 2005) • used as a renewable resource for securing audiences, performance or exhibition outlets and relationships with key brokers by participants in the milieu’ (Jones, Anand and Alvarez, 2005: 893) • Linked to corporate social responsibility and sustainability, through notions such as ‘greenwashing’ • Demonstrating authenticity through visibility and the ‘authenticity paradox’ (Guthey and Jackson, 2005) • Charles Taylor (1991) not inevitable that we are locked into a ‘culture of authenticity’ based on narcissism; alternative based on responsibilization, whereby the ideal of authenticity encourages a more self-responsible form of life

6. Contesting authenticity • Increased questioning of authenticity (e.g. ‘Lonely Girl 15’) • Growing number of films made by ‘slick corporations’ • Redaction: active audience engagement through content editing to create value, deal with information overload and challenge the intended message http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oNedC3j0e4 • Astroturfing: professionally commissioned content that appears to be produced by individual amateurs who are representing grassroots interests http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZSqXUSwHRI

7. Methodology • Emergent-spontaneous data collection • To understand the organisation of viral films and how viral films impact upon business ethics • Producers, audiences and texts • Network relationships between Free Range and Story of Stuff • Using new social media as a research tool (e.g. Skype interviews) • Critical, collaborative research • Multimodal semiotic analysis , draws attention to the role of the sign-maker in shaping meaning

8. Free Range Studios • Creative design company set up in 1999, based in Washington D.C. and Berkeley, California, currently employs 24 full-time staff

9. Making Viral Films Right about 1999, there was this understanding that the means of distribution and the means of production of media were kind of going out of the hands of traditional gatekeepers and into the hands of everybody... cause based messages had sort of been shut out of the marketplace because of money basically, and also because gatekeepers were sensitive to controversial messages... – FR Co-Founder and Creative Director We had some viral successes very early on, but it was, you know, very much pre YouTube. You know, some of the early things I think worked not even because they were great pieces, but because they were... some of the few things that actually moved and made noise on the internet... back then... internet cartoons and videos were novel – FR Co-Founder and Creative Director • The Meatrix(2003), was produced pro-bono and funded by the Global Resource Centre for the Environment, 9 million views in first six months, ranked ‘number one on the internet’ for a day/two days, 20 million views by 2008 • Success based on storytelling and accessing the emotional meanings attached to greening

10. The Meatrix 2.5

11. The Story of Stuff • Non-profit company and film making project (5 full-time staff) founded by activist Annie Leonard in 2007 in response to the overwhelming success of the first film ‘to leverage and extend the film’s impact’ by releasing a series of related films

12. Constructing authenticity It’s really hard and frankly tricky. If you’re in the non-profit sector we tend to be more casual. We’ll read your mission statement and say “Right, okay, that’s great.” But if you’re a business, then we are not only looking at your mission statement, but also how you treat employees or what your supply chain is, and we don’t do that for a non-profit. We don’t go into a non-profit and say “Can you tell me whether you give your employees good health care?” As a society don’t hold non-profits to the same standards. We’ve been much more demanding of businesses than we have been of non-profits, even though they are on the same slippery slope of authenticity – FR Partner I don’t think these issues are ever resolved. I think it’s an on-going question and discussion. Even yesterday I was talking with our Studio Director and she was saying “Do we want to work for Coke? You know, the fact is their very nature is a product that’s not good for people, right? So how do we feel about pushing a product that’s not good for people?”... These are conversations that come up frequently at Free Range and we have a wide spectrum of people who have different ideas all the way from “Absolutely not, any commercial product - I don’t want to do” all the way to people saying “I’m willing to be team mates with anyone who’s being authentic, even if it is motivated by the bottom line, even if it means they’re producing a product that I don’t particularly think is good for people, I’m willing to play with them if they can effect real world change”. That’s a large stretch to reconcile - and we have to make frequent decisions about who to take on as a client – FR Partner Authenticity around sustainability to me means it’s not just greenwashing. So you’re not just slapping a sticker on something to make it appear as if it were more environmentally or people friendly than it is. And, when I say sustainable I don’t just mean in an environmental way. I mean sustainable for people as well– FR Partner

13. The Story of The Story of Stuff The people who I knew... were really passionate and really smart, but sometimes had a hard time connecting... I knew if you showed up in fleece and Birkenstocks then the conversation was over – FR Partner People are tired of being made to feel guilty or made to feel angry and they need sort of a good dose of humour. The piece needs to feel like a gift in the way it’s delivered to them and not a demand... which means telling stories that make people smile and make people see the deep problems within a context of something that’s deeply satisfying and exciting – FR Co-Founder and Creative Director Annie [Leonard] been working on these issues for a long time, but she had always kind of communicated ... in a... nerdier way... she did a... workshop with a bunch of other activists and leaders and they just gave her a lot of really authentic feedback about how she could make her... rap, so to speak, more accessible and, you know, she really took it to heart... she was super frustrated by her inability to communicate the information in a way that resonated with people, so almost as a joke she started... [using] these stick figures... to tell her story and it immediately became apparent that... [it] was such a better way to tell the story and she started getting invited places to... give her talk... and everyone kept saying to her... “You should make a film of this...” and so she just kept collecting the business cards of all of the people who said “you should make a film of this...” and then finally she got some seed funding from a Foundation out here in the Bay area and had a friend of hers film her give the talk and then went to Free Range Studios and said... “Can you make a film of this?” - S of S Director The view counts were quite impressive, but the… bigger and kind of potentially more exciting thing for us was... we were just literally getting hundreds and hundreds, you know, eventually thousands and hundreds of thousands of emails from people just, you know, telling us their stories about how they had watched the film and it had made them re-think... there was something about the film that was... putting into motion a kind of energy and excitement about changing things... so we kind of cobbled together this very kind of slap-dash project with the idea that we would maybe be able to get a little bit of funding to be able to sustain... some engagement with the people... who were getting in touch. - S of S Director

14. The Story of Stuff ... over 12 million views, across 220 countries and territories

15. Corporate Redaction in Response to The Story of Bottled Water • Films that ‘boomerang’ - produce an effect directly opposite to the one intended You know a project is a success in the viral model, you know, if it starts being talked about and if it starts to create a bit of a [buzz]... if something initiates a debate or really sparks a conversation, you know, lots of good, heated conversation, we like that - FR Executive Producer We’ve certainly gotten our fair share of push-back... [some of that critique has] made it onto several national TV show shows around us kind of pushing socialist or communist propaganda to children [chuckling]… On some level, you know, we can wear it as a badge of honour that our work is meaningful enough and powerful enough that... people are paying attention to it – S of S Director That was such a funny video that they made, my goodness. So with The Story of Bottled Water – kind of much as you would expect – we got some push-back from the industry and they actually attempted to make their own video to kind of counter ours and talk about the ‘real’ story of bottled water and how bottled water’s so good for you and blah, blah, blah, but it was so tragically badly done that it really just made us look a lot better – S of S Director It was awful and it was hilariously bad... The production value was terrible. The message was so transparently bad. It was… it was grasping at straws and anyone with half a brain could see right through it... If we receive backlash on what we’ve done, then we’ve done our job – FR Creative Director http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eklg6j2G2pk

16. Conclusions • Blurring the boundaries and informalisingorganizational practice: • powerful/powerless • organization/client • professionalism/amateurism, • work identity /personal identity • and work-time/leisure-time