Colombian Audiovisual Memory in YouTube

Among all the metaphors that can be used to understand YouTube, I choose the one of an archive because it allows me to explore the relation between media and memory. As an archive, YouTube is an open and global digital repository of audiovisual records in constant expansion, produced by a range of users and participants with a variety of interests and skills. Evidence of its archival characteristic can be found in the almost 200 millions of videos that compose the “world’s largest vault for moving-image material.” (Snickars and Vondera: 13) While users upload videos of any kind to the expanding archive, including original, remixed, and copied material, and both private and public content; the owners of YouTube provide the storage service and the infrastructure for searching, classifying, and watching. As a result of the low barriers of entry to the archive, and the simple and easy way in which anybody could contribute, the audiovisual records that are stored in YouTube are incredible diverse and they come from all parts of the world. From home movies to music videos to TV shows clips to videos of war combats, the variety of genres, formats, themes, styles and quality is enormous. Such diversity of records and openness is one of the reasons why Youtube has become a sort of defacto audiovisual archive that people around the world use for remembering the past and constructing personal, collective and cultural memories. For the specific case of Colombian audiovisual records, YouTube has helped to solve the lack of public access to copies of television shows, commercials, and films from the 20th Century,  as well as has opened a dynamic space for a more participatory construction of collective memory.

YouTube, however, is not an archive in a traditional and institutional sense. (Gehl; Hilderbrand) YouTube is a very particular kind of archive that is informal, disorganized, and lacks professional quality and preservation standards. In contrast to official archives that are highly regulated, centralized, and coherent according to a top-down hierarchical structure, YouTube is messy, built in a more distributed manner by its users. While some scholars have highlighted the democratic potential of such kind of archive (Prelinger; Jenkins), others have warned about the power of corporate media in controlling and censoring the circulation and visibility of content. (Gehl; McMurria; Hilderbrand)  It is precisely the tension between different interests what makes YouTube a good example of what Henry Jenkins has described as convergence culture, “a top-down corporate-driven process and a bottom-up consumer-driven process,” (18) that is in constant negotiation as the old communication environment transitions to, and collides with, new media tools, networks, and practices.

Despite the unresolved tensions between the top-down and bottom-up interests, and between the democratizing potential and the risk of manipulation and control, YouTube has proven to be a successful system for engaging all kinds of Colombian users (media industries, governmental institutions, fans, ONGs, politicians, independent media producers, and the actors of the armed conflict) in archival practices that expand from curation to browsing to watching audiovisual content. Users can explore the archive by using a search engine functionality that allows them to run queries of keywords or phrases across all the content that is stored in the YouTube servers. After running a search, the system retrieves videos (usually thousands) and displays them in a list with some basic information. For instance, the result of a query using the phrase “television Colombiana” retrieves 234,000 results. The list  start videos uploaded by ordinary users and includes TV specials about the history of Colombian television produced during the 1990s (TV “Colombiana en el Siglo XX,” “50 Años de la Television Colombiana:), commercials from the 1980s (“Comerciales TV Colombiana 80´s”),   comedy shows from different periods of time (“Tu y Yo, (1956-1976)”  “Vuelo Secreto, (1990s)”) and news broadcast (“Primera Emision TV Colombiana 1954”) that go back in history as far as to  the year of 1954 when Television was introduced to the country during the military government of Rojas Pinilla.  The presence of multiple comedy shows needs to be highlighted because that kind of media texts became one of the most important artifacts for constructing the memory of a Colombian nation and imagining a Colombian identity. The comedy shows also provide clues about the dynamic transformations of the Colombian laugh and humor, as well as the evolution in representation of different geographic regions and social classes. The first comedy show, for instance, “Tu y Yo,” was a depiction of the middle class from Bogota, the capital.

YouTube users can navigate the archive by following the suggestions that the recommendation system displays during and after any video is watched. The suggestions are based on the classification work that other users did at the moment of uploading the videos such as adding tags, choosing categories (Autos & Vehicles, Comedy, Education, Entertainment, Film & Animation, Gaming, Howto & Style, Music, News & Politics, Nonprofits & Activitsm, People & Blogs, Pets & Animals, Sicence & Technology, Sports, Travel & Events), creating a tittle and providing a description.  The constant display of such related video suggestions encourages the user to keep watching more clips, and, as Andreas Treske has pointed out, reflects the functionality of a video jukebox. Hence, the viewing conditions of the user of the YouTube archive include watching any video always in relation to a series of other audiovisual texts that are just one click away. However, given the distributed character of the classification work and the lack of regulatory practices, the relation between the videos could appear  sometimes to be random and not based in a rigorous system. For the specific case of  the video of “Yo y Tu,” the videos that appear listed on the side of the screening box include commercials, interviews and homages to famous Colombian actors, radio soup operas (Kaliman: el hombre increible), TV comedies (Don Chinche) and radio comedians (Montecristo, los Tolimenses, la Nena Jimenez). At the end of the “Yo y Tu” video clip, 12 different videos, similar to the ones listed on the side, are  displayed in the screening box in form of little rectangles.

In order to keep the YouTube flow experience, as well as moved by the nostalgia of my personal memories, I clicked in the video “Don Chinche Cap1 parte 1.mpg.” Don Chinche, was a comedy TV series that aired during the 1980s, and that I remember watching in the company of my parents at the Sundays evenings. All the video recommendations that appear at the moment of watching the clip are videos of different chapters of the series, and interestingly, all of them have been uploaded by a user called MrTatolex.  This user has uploaded  more than 300 chapters of Don Chinche to YouTube.  This comedy show had  as location the capital of Bogota and developed a humor representing the lower urban classes, in particular the ones that were made up of rural immigrants.

Robert Gehl has argued that Youtube is like a cabinet of curiosities (Wunderkammer) where all the media objects are decontextualized and flattened, arranged without a systematic categorization. According to him it is like an archive awaiting for organizers of displays. Such kind of organizing work can be done by independent curators such as bloggers and researchers that can classify in a more systematic way, according to historic and genre categories that the YouTube system ignores.  In the case of the Colombian audiovisual memory, there is a lot of work that needs to be done and that can help us to better understand how the collective memory of the country has been constructed using moving images and sounds.