Problematizing the Internet as a video distribution technology: an assemblage theory analysis

Abstract

While the Internet has rapidly become an important distribution technology for video producers, it is also a problematic one for some of them. I explore the difficulties associated with its use to distribute videos through an analysis of a one-year ethnographic investigation of community, activist and fan video producers in the United States and UK. My analysis draws upon Actor-Network Theory and DeLanda's reading of Deleuze and Guatarri's concept of assemblages, and shows that while my informants were engaged in various processes to create and stabilize their video distribution assemblages, these were precarious as they were also subject to destabilizing processes resulting from their complex and contested nature. This situation often resulted in the producers being left with distribution assemblages which did not satisfy their goals. Framing the problematic aspects of their distribution practices in these terms shows that these aspects can not only be understood as resulting from the producers’ specific circumstances as they struggled with, for example, corporate interests, the limited affordances of the video hosting and social media platforms they used, or the social dynamics of which they were apart, but that they can also be understood more generally as arising from the processes of human-technology entanglements, providing an alternative perspective to previous studies.

Keywords:

• social media
• video
• online communities
• activism
• fans
• community media
• Actor-Network Theory
• assemblage theory

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

John J. Hondros is a Teaching Fellow in Media and Communications at the University of Sussex. His research interests include materialist approaches to digital media, and the use of interactive visual media to present academic research. [email: [email protected]]

Notes

1. Also, the academic convention of referring to film and television fans by their pseudonyms only is adopted here at their request.

2. With one exception, my informants’ websites were download-only and the primary reason given for this was the technical difficulty and potential cost of building and maintaining a streaming website.

3. In the spirit of Serres’ view that ‘a single key won't open all the locks’ (1995, p. 91).