Learning the Five Lessons of YouTube: After Trying to Teach There, I Don't Believe the Hype

This article presents five lessons about how YouTube, the Web 2.0 poster-child, underperforms in relation to the celebratory rhetoric of DIY culture. Juhasz considers YouTube's many failings. It is not democratic. It abuses its users. It reifies expertise and laughs at amateurs. It forecloses community. It is hard to use. Of course, it also greatly pleases its users through distraction and plentitude, condensing previous formal pleasures into irresistible forms all the better to get eyeballs to advertisements. Given its corporate imperatives, while it is certainly DIY, the problem is it will never be punk.