by Jessie Berg

Created on: May 19, 2009

In what ways does the social networking site 'MySpace' and video sharing website 'YouTube' transform the production, circulation and consumption of popular culture?

The landscape of Popular culture has been entering a new and radically different era since the dawn of the second millennium and the proliferation of vast quantities of digital information on the Internet. As Arjun Appadurai describes, 'It takes only the merest of acquaintances with the facts of the modern world to note that it is now an interactive system in a sense which is strikingly new.' The interactive system of which he speaks includes many areas such as politics and finance, but I will focus specifically on the ways in which the production, circulation and consumption of popular culture has been revolutionized by the rise of information sharing websites in particular the Social Networking Sites (SNS), in particular MySpace and the video hosting website YouTube.

Drawing on the work of Jean Burgess I believe that the task for popular cultural studies is to find new ways to understand and engage with 'the full diversity of existing and emerging media contexts' in which I don't consider there is an up to date framework for analyzing contemporary features of the production and consumption of popular culture. The issues I will specifically explore include consumer agency and self-representation, drawing on the research of Dan Perkel, I will look at how the production of a MySpace profile involves the reproduction and a strict literacy in the signs of popular culture. I will also explore the ways in which the increase of amateur production and easy methods of information circulation have impacted tradition producers of popular culture, and in conclusion I will explore the attempt of online production company ViveCoolCity.com to subvert the tradition circulation and consumption patterns of popular culture through drawing on the framework of Jean Burgess.

There is much anxiety in cultural studies surrounding the issue of consumer agency and the intrinsic value of popular culture. In Burgesses work 'hearing ordinary voices' he accurately points out that recent developments in the uses of new media have significant ethical and methodological implications for the discipline of pop culture. New democratic forms of media such as SNS have radically transformed the way ordinary people interact with popular culture blurring the distinction between

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