Rethinking participatory video in the times of YouTube

Introduction

Over the last century, a number of technological devices, from television to personal computers through connected smartphones, have successively enabled novel ways of understanding cultural practice. The pace at which this has happened in the last couple of decades has been particularly high. The Internet popularized around the mid 1990s and it is already hard to remember what culture looked like before digital, online technology arrived. Focusing on the material memory of culture is not (or should not be) a matter of nostalgia. A critical narrative can effectively be construed around past technological devices and the specific socio-cultural phenomena that such technology made possible. In fact, such a material memory (Sturken, 2016) is precisely the kind of critical contribution that could help us to examine the affordances and constraints of the now pervasive digital culture. It would allow us, for instance, to gain a better understanding of how available technology shapes not only the various ways in which a specific cultural practice is produced, but also the conditions under which particular communities of practice are created, as well as their political edge and social significance in different socio-economic contexts and historical moments.

We can briefly consider the example of fanvids where fans create music videos using mainly mass media footage as a way to explore and share their admiration for original audiovisual material (Coppa, 2011; Gallucci and Pantolony, 2008). It is now well-established that fanvids were born in 1975 when Kandy Fong synced Star Trek still images to music from a cassette player at Equicon/Filmcon convention. In the 1980s, fanvid saw the popularization of home video recording and the consolidation of a booming community of practitioners organized in video collectives. Gatherings where fanvids were shown, including fan conventions, conferences, and meetings, also flourished in the 1980s and 1990s. Even if not clearly politicized, fanvids were seen as a collective practice, organized around a community that, to say the least, represented a challenge to established copyright regulations. Today, 15 years after the arrival of online video, fanvids are mostly studied in the context of contemporary, digital remix culture where many creators remain unaware of how their practice relates to a long, mostly female, tradition of collective cultural work. In spite of a clear formal continuity between analogue and digital practice, for most digital vidders (as they are also known) their videos revolve around an individual’s relation to fan culture. The arrival of digital culture has therefore marked

a shift from a relatively inaccessible niche culture, to the center of a visible and accessible digital hub: it means that what vids are, who they are for, and what they do has changed dramatically in the past decade, a change that continues today. (Stein, 2014)

For Henry Jenkins, vidders’ initial widespread rejection of YouTube (because of concerns about their practice being misinterpreted and also out of fear of legal prosecution for copyright violation) speaks of the ways in which Internet culture might be perceived to clash, absorb, and radically transform pre-existing video practices. He concludes that ‘corporations rarely create communities; (they) court pre-existing communities with their own traditions, their own values and norms, their own hierarchies, their own practices, and their own leadership’ (Jenkins, 2009: 110). However, in his approach to YouTube as the epitome of so-called ‘participatory culture’, Jenkins seems to ignore how, even in the case of fanvids, participation itself is transformed from a collective endeavor negotiated by the members of a specific community of practice into a solipsistic cultural exercise whose limits (for instance, regarding the use of copyrighted material) are set by YouTube as a commercial corporation.

So instead of seeing YouTube as new and unprecedented, a fairer assessment might be that the site brought cyber-culture and digital technology into the practice of video making and sharing; a practice where a number of communities were already formed and had their own consolidated ways of relating to each other, resolving conflicts, collaborating, or exchanging their work. Participatory Video (hereinafter PV) represents another one of such communities. As a practice, PV is based on the idea of using facilitated, group video creation with a view to promoting social justice and community development (High et al., 2012); its origins are linked to the popularization of cheap, portable, analogue video equipment in the late 1960s (Montero and Moreno, 2014). In fact, a typical PV experience would rely heavily on analogue video-making as a collective endeavor where participants need to collaborate in order to agree on what they want to depict and how to create a storyboard, record interviews, film a number of sequences, edit, and so on. Importance is placed on the idea of sharing the camera and on the fact that each of the participants contribute different capacities to the creation of the final film. Even screening is clearly conceived as a collective act, with the ensuing films shown back to participant communities in public events, sometimes followed by discussion and debate (Lunch and Lunch, 2006).

This article revolves around the ways in which PV practitioners have negotiated the arrival of digital video-making and the latter’s increasing focus on individual cultural production. My initial hypothesis foregrounds the question of whether digital, online video might represent a threat to fundamental, well-established elements of PV as a practice, as platforms such as YouTube seem to readdress PV discourses toward individual, non-political, and highly profitable video-making as part of their own business plan. Throughout the article, we would aim to highlight the relation between technology and cultural practice in order to pose questions about the extent to which digital media can be appropriated for collective, political video-making. Our ultimate hope is not only to understand PV’s relation to digital technology, but also to foreground a wider critical concern that represents a second hypothesis in the context of this article: that digital technology is contributing significantly to the radical transformation of our understanding of participatory cultures, whereby participation is either ritualized or reduced to voicing one’s individual concerns and opinions as opposed to acquiring a commitment to contribute to a collective endeavor.

Methodologically, an initial survey was carried out among PV practitioners in different countries with a view to understanding whether and how they use digital technology within their PV projects. Semi-structured interviews were also conducted with established members and perceived key innovators within the PV community of practice (Wenger, 1999) in order to further examine different positions in relation to the impact of digital culture within PV practice. For the article itself, a case-study approach has been followed in order to foreground perceived trends within the PV community regarding the use of digital resources. Nonetheless, relevant data regarding case-studies have been drawn from variety of documentary sources. ¹

We will begin by assessing PV as a participatory practice, identifying commonalities within different approaches to using video collaboratively. We will then examine the importance of group practice and address facilitation and empowerment as key elements within traditional, ‘analogue’ PV experiences, also considering the increase in critical voices in recent years. From there, we move on to discuss the ways in which key PV practitioners have negotiated the arrival of technological change and the impact that digital and online video culture, particularly YouTube, has had on the PV community of practice, paying specific attention to how peripheral actors are experimenting with innovative ways to bring participatory culture into digital environments. Finally, we will address online video and YouTube in particular, challenging the sort of participation these technological platforms foreground.

Participatory video practice

The origins of PV as a practice are profoundly linked to the general popularization of analogue video technology in the 1960s, although the basic principles of PV can in fact be traced to a number of previous film experiences reaching as far back as the 1920s (see Montero and Moreno, 2014). Nonetheless, by the end of the 1960s, the project Challenge for Change in Canada had produced the first participatory and community videos through the so-called Fogo Process under the direction of Donald Snowden and filmmaker Colin Low in the remote region of Newfoundland. The basic idea consisted in the use of video technology so as to allow remote, rural communities to express their views and also to listen to the needs, hopes, and fears of other islanders, particularly in relation to an ambitious resettlement program being promoted by the government at the time.

Since then, a strong community of practice has grown around PV as a methodology that facilitates the involvement of communities in the creation of audiovisual material in order to promote empowerment and, ultimately, social change, mostly in the context of cooperation and development programs promoted by organizations such as the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO). ² However, since the original experience in Fogo (and to a great extent simultaneously), PV as a methodology has been adapted and modified to suit different aims and projects.

As a practice, PV remains extremely difficult to define because there are several lineages of practice with their roots in multiple origins (High et al., 2012) and a number of cognate terms (‘participatory documentary’, ‘collective filmmaking’, ‘collaborative videomaking’, ‘video-activism’, and ‘community filmmaking’, among others), which may or may not indicate a similar approach. One approach is to start with its purpose or application, as White (2003) does:

[. . .] a tool for individual, group and community development. It can serve as a powerful force for people to see themselves in relation to the community and become conscientized about personal and community needs. It brings about a critical awareness that forms the foundation for creativity and communication. Thus, it has the potential to bring about personal, social, political, and cultural change. (p. 64)

Other theoretical approaches opt to highlight the ‘social intervention’ that takes place in a PV experience, which is seen as,

a process whereby a community is socially transformed through a collective reflection around the issues of identity, organization and self-representation. Such a transformation must come from within the community itself; it is an emancipatory achievement allowing them to create their own discourses through audio-visual means. (Espinosa, 2012: 73. my translation)

There are traditions of PV practice in fields such as health (Chalfen and Rich, 2007), education (Copeland and Decker, 1996), and applied social science (Pink, 2007). But what is perhaps the strongest and most developed tradition has emerged from an overlap between work in community artswork and in community development, where it has found application as a tool for expressing and disseminating popular knowledge (Lunch, 2004), influencing policymakers (Petheram et al., 2012; Plush, 2009), and working with marginalized groups (Dudley, 2003) to achieve social and environmental justice.

Considering the some of the best documented examples of the work within these diverse fields of action (Mitchell et al., 2012), there are some basic commonalities among different traditions within PV that would hopefully help in situating it as a practice within the realm of participatory cultures:

In fact, the films themselves usually revolve around community issues and in many models of practice the members of the communities which the participants represent are the primary audience for a participatory film (Odutola, 2003), triggering a reflective process that helps the group to understand how audiovisual technology works and to what extent it can help in providing an effective platform for the community to come together and discuss pressing issues.

As several academics have indicated, the meaning of ‘empowerment’ has severely mutated over the last decades. Originally, it alluded to a necessary change in established power structures; however, this radical streak has been severely diluted to the point where it becomes necessary to re-politicize the term if we are to link it in any way to the concept of social change. As F Cleaver (2001) pointed out already in 2001, ‘as “empowerment” has become a buzzword in development, an essential objective of projects, its radical, challenging, transformatory edge has been lost. The concept of action has become individualized, empowerment depoliticized’ (p. 37).

A politicized approach to ‘empowerment’ as a concept would, therefore, be related to the conception of film collectives as social actors, to the possibility of political action and to an awareness of systemic power relations within and outside a particular community. Placing the concept at the level of power structures equally means examining the interests of each of the actors taking part in a PV experience and reflecting critically about whether the process is actually contributing to positive social change within the community or simply responding to the interests of the organizations that are responsible for it. The ritualization of the participatory process, emptying it of any real attempt at social transformation, has been a recurrent problem within many participatory experiences, as ‘empowerment’ has many times ended up being equated to the mere expression of ideas (through the formula of ‘giving voice’) without these being transformed into a collectively formulated political discourse followed by a concrete course of action.

Recently, PV practices have come under the scrutiny of more power-conscious academics and practitioners who are beginning to counteract the overtly celebratory literature around PV. Power dynamics around facilitation and the rarely addressed politics of PV experiences have received strong criticism. The idea of the facilitator as an outsider bringing technology to a non-savvy community has been said to reinforce the boundaries between insiders and outsiders within the community (Mitchell et al., 2014: 438), with several voices advocating for the use of technology already in use within the participant community (MacEntee et al., 2016). PV politics have also been said to emphasize personal empowerment over the role played by social and political forces in the marginalization of many participant communities (Walsh, 2016: 406), while conveniently ignoring controversial aspects underpinning PV experiences in extremely liberalized contexts.

Participatory video and digital culture

The arrival and success of digital and online video foregrounded a number of questions that remain key in order to understand the complex and diverse ways in which PV as a practice has been affected by digital culture. What were the long-term socio-cultural implications of using digital video-making? To what extent did platforms such as YouTube change the rules of the game in relation to distribution and screening practices? How did the basic premises of digital participatory culture relate to PV as a horizontal, collective, facilitated, and profoundly political cultural practice? How can online, digital video promote political consciousness and empowerment? What has PV to gain from digital video? And, probably more crucially, what could PV lose by incorporating digital elements to its methodological setup?

We would like to focus now on the PV community of practice response to the emergence of digital culture and on the ways it has affected PV practice on the ground. It should be noted that the PV community of practice is quite heterogeneous with individual practitioners, scholars, participants, and aficionados from different fields engaging and interacting in a number of ways, not always clearly connected to each other. Nevertheless, we can safely distinguish between the ‘leadership’ (Wenger et al., 2009: 10) of long-term core representatives of the community, such as non-government organization (NGO) Insightshare or long-committed academics, and the role played by more peripheral participants who not always espouse the idea of PV as a label they are comfortable with. For our analysis, we have identified specific organizations and scholars that represent opposing and complementing positions in their negotiation of digital culture within the field of PV.

Also, readers should be aware that the proposed analysis will not discuss digital media as a tool in itself, but rather focus on digital culture and its impact on PV as a practice. In general, digital technology has never represented a problem in itself for the PV community. Apart from die-hard fans of camcorders and analogue video-editing equipment, the use of digital equipment has been in general heralded as a step toward the democratization of media practices and, in particular, as an opportunity to develop PV experiences at a cheaper price and in simpler ways (Ferreira, 2006: 3). However, it is important to note that, in most cases, digital cameras and computers had been used in exactly the same way as camcorders and video-editors. Even the use of tablets for recording images normally implied sharing a single tablet among participants in the same way as one would use a single, analogue camcorder.

The only exception we will make to this involves the practice of cellphilming and the use of smartphones in participatory setups, as their very conception responds to the idea of a profoundly individual technological development. In the last few years, widely recognized scholars within the field, most notably Claudia Mitchell, have espoused the term ‘cellphilms’ as a sort of PV 2.0. The concept was coined by Jonathan Dockney in order to describe films ‘made for a cellphone, made by a cellphone’ (Dockney and Tomaselli, 2009: 126). In the literature we are examining, cellphilms refer to the incorporation of camera equipped smartphones in PV experiences. Here, smartphones are incorporated not merely as a digital tool, but are also seen to bring in with them ‘[. . .] a new set of conditions within which to examine critical issues linked to participatory video’ (Mitchell et al., 2014: 436). As with PV before, the literature on cellphilms has so far been openly celebratory. Digital cameras and smartphones are presented in fact as the solution to a number of problems associated with PV methodology. Following this, their popularity worldwide allows for a kind of ‘non-interventionist intervention’ (Mitchell et al., 2014: 436) as it does away with the idea of bringing in video technology (mostly camcorders and editing equipment) to remote communities, replacing it with the use of technology that is already in use within the participant community. In this respect, cellphilms are perceived to ‘combat the assumption that marginalized individuals need an intermediary to tell their stories or to help them do so’ (MacEntee et al., 2016: 8). However, facilitation is still key within cellphilm experiences, although it is argued that the distance between community insiders and the facilitator as an outsider is greatly reduced; the absence of an outsider facilitator makes it easier for peer–to-peer learning to take place (Watson et al., 2016: 44) as the latter is not seen as bringing technology to the community, but rather as sharing the use of a technology that participants are to different extents familiar with.

In fact, the transformation of PV into cellphilms implies a challenge to PV as a practice in more ways that Mitchell, de Lange, and Moletsane (as well as later on MacEntee et al., 2016) actually care to address in their categorization of cellphilming as a practice. While it is true that smartphones represent a more popular, accessible technology in order to engage with participants, their use is determined by a vast number of normative cultural discourses that present them as profoundly individual technological elements. Smartphones are for personal use only. The idea of sharing a mobile phone is radically opposed to the cultural norms attached to its use (Karlson et al., 2009; Sey, 2009); individuality is built into their design to the point that we can think of smartphones as the culmination of a socio-economic process whereby technology is quickly becoming a profoundly intimate affair. How is it possible to reconcile meanings of individuality attached to smartphones with a radically collective cultural practice such as PV?.

As explained by Mitchell et al. (2016), the methodology followed by cellphilm practitioners does value group work and attempts to preserve PV methodology by bringing participants together in a number of tasks and activities (i.e. choosing a subject to work with, screenings, discussion, etc.); most times, even a single film is made out of images filmed by different participants in the context of a cellphilm workshop and sometimes a shared smart-phone is used (Chan et al., 2016: 124). However, the fact that such group dynamics directly clash with the normative uses of smart-phone technology has so far rarely been addressed in cellphilm academic literature, where smartphones are presented as a ground-breaking innovation and a key element in sorting out the contradictions of PV as a practice. The strategies through which cellphilms preserve the collective nature of PV remains an area in need of in-depth critical attention by cellphilm scholars.

Other, more peripheral actors within the PV community have thoroughly transformed PV methodology in order to promote new forms of collective empowerment through the use digital media. Basque content creators, Ubiqa, (http://www.ubiqa.com/) have transposed certain aspects of the PV process to the creation of collective video platforms. Their practice combines short training workshops, where participants learn to use their mobile phones to record interviews, with the creation of online video websites showcasing participants’ work online in different formats (through longer videos, group mapping and other related content). The focus here is not so much on collective production and shared ownership over media (for instance, participants do not have direct control over the editing process of longer videos and documentaries). Instead, the central activity of such organizations is the definition of digital spaces of interaction where participants can upload their material alongside others in order to maximize social impact.

Organizations such as Ubiqa base the collective nature of their activities not on the fostering of specific group dynamics (which is central to PV as a practice), but rather on the collaborative creation of resources that could be appropriated by the wider community in a number of ways. They establish different levels at which people can engage, either by attending the workshops or simply by co-opting and reusing the material at a later stage. In an interview for this research, Ubiqa’s managing director José Luis Roncero (2015) points out that the ultimate aim is always to promote

collective empowerment, although I would not say I am doing PV. For starters, it is very difficult to think in video these days as separated from other kind of multimedia content. We mostly work with audiovisual media, but it is mixed with different forms from maps to photographs. (J.L. Roncero, personal communication)

The results embrace fragmentation as an outcome of hegemonic visual culture, and focus on giving shape to such a fragmentation in an attempt to foster collective action and awareness. ‘Mobiles represent our audiovisual technology of choice. They represent a simple, easy-to-use technology and levels of access are quickly surpassing other devices such as digital cameras and computers, even in developing countries’, explains Roncero. The challenge for Ubiqa therefore lies in defining online platforms which structure participants’ contributions and organize them around themes and initiatives that make collective sense to wider communities, sparkling new possibilities for participation. In line with digital video culture, Ubiqa’s hybrid projects represent a more dynamic and porous understanding of how individual and collective action relate to each other; however, it is important to point out that such an approach does not necessarily means renouncing facilitation as a significant process, although the role of the facilitator seems to have shifted from community mediator to digital curator. Still, in most of Ubiqa’s actions, facilitation remains key to channel a project toward its transformative end, although seen only as a first step directed toward the involvement of the wider community and also toward the posterior sustained, low-level engagement of participants through online interaction. In-person involvement gets a project going, but its long-term success depends on people appropriating it through digital means, which in turn requires that the project sits firmly within hegemonic digital culture.

Other significant actors within the PV community of practice have foregrounded the challenges and difficulties presented by smartphones in relation to central tenets of PV practice. Oxford-based NGO Insightshare represents one of the key organizations within the field of PV with a long list of PV projects in their 20 years of existence. Insightshare has been discussing (for a number of years now) the development of a PV app; a notion that has for them encapsulated many of the difficulties in transposing the basic tenets of PV to the field of digital and online culture. From the very beginning, the idea of a PV app found resistance among some of the practitioners within the organization on the grounds that ‘smartphones and tablets are by their nature highly individualistic’. However, the general feeling among Insightshare’s practitioners also seemed to be that ‘the time for an app had come’, as camcorders were quickly being replaced by smaller, more individually oriented devices (Benest, 2015). Here, the key question for Insightshare remained how to appropriate technology so that collective action, group working, equal participation, collaborative authoring, and shared ownership are preserved. The plan was for their PV app to focus on allowing people to coordinate more effectively in the task of creating a collective video, rather than using the app to enable individuals to make a video or shoot scenes on their own that would, later on, become part of a collective undertaking. The app was thought to act as a guide so that group work can progress through the different stages of a PV experience, allowing participants to use their own mobiles more or less in the way they would have used a shared camcorder. However, the reluctance of some of Insightshare’s PV practitioners about the relevance of the video app, the expectations for it and the fact that it would not allow to interact in the ways in which most people use digital, online video, ended up thwarting the project as funding could not be secured (S. Muñiz, personal communication, 2019).

Interviewed for this research, project coordinator Soledad Muñiz also explains that the emergence of digital video websites has barely affected Insightshare’s way of working with video on the ground, although the possibility of publishing the videos in these websites has favored ‘a more robust informed consent process when a project has the goal to share the videos outside the community via the internet (hence, creating a YouTube channel or on the website/channel of a project stakeholder)’ (S. Muñiz, personal communication, 2019). Most of Insightshare’s videos are published on the Internet and shared through the organization’s profiles on various social networking sites in an effort to get the videos, and particularly the stories behind them, to be known beyond the communities where these issues originate. Insightshare has also used new information and communication technologies (ICTs) in order to promote sustained training among participants in PV experiences.

Negotiating the Tube

As Insightshare, many other PV organizations have used YouTube for reasons that mostly point toward the easy circulation of videos and their overall impact, particularly when there is an advocacy element involved (Montero and Moreno, 2014). The need to counteract or critically question participatory discourses around YouTube is hardly perceived as a priority by the PV community of practice, even when YouTube has been evaluated consciously as a meaningful site when it comes to participation and video (Burgess and Green, 2009). In fact, the conception of YouTube as a site of participatory culture has tended to place the focus on digital technology, rather than on the social dynamics which shape participation on the site. This might actually generate the false impression that the same kind of collective participation fostered by PV might come naturally from the mere use of social media, neglecting the complex balance required of a truly participatory setup based on inclusion, social justice, and equality.

As argued by Burgess and Green (2009), ‘if they encounter one another under the right conditions, the website is an enabler of encounters with cultural differences and the development of political “listening” across belief systems and identities’ (p. 77, emphasis added). From this perspective, YouTube is seen as potentially enhancing the opportunities to engage with participatory media, as it promotes bottom-up cultural dynamics based on peer interaction and on the co-creation of cultural artifacts. However, YouTube might also reproduce and reinforce existing inequalities. Participatory and transformative cultural video practice is not particularly encouraged by YouTube as a platform, but rather emerges from the ways in which users engage with the site. It would help to imagine YouTube as a vast ecosystem where participatory potential and artistic creativity constantly clash with more problematic dynamics.

An attentive look at the unwritten rules governing YouTube suggests priorities which differ widely from pre-YouTube participatory culture as practiced, for instance, by the PV community. While PV revolves around collectivities, YouTube foregrounds new more individualized ways of working with video. Even the idea of YouTube as a community (fostered by YouTube itself during its first years of existence) seems to have given way to an overt emphasis on individual users and their personal contributions to the site (Dias da Silva, 2012). On YouTube, attempts to monetize user-generated content have led to the gradual marginalization of amateur voices on the site, privileging entertainment and limiting more socially significant modes of engagement (Fabos, 2004; Farchy, 2009) to the point of promoting what Wasko and Erickson (2009) term ‘corporation sanctioned user-generated content’ (p. 381).

With this in mind, Spurgeon et al. (2009) point out that the understanding of YouTube as a participatory endeavor needs to differentiate between a spontaneous model of participatory media and ‘planned, intentional participatory media engagements that rely upon professional facilitators to lead collaborative projects with explicit purposes and aims’. This would suggest a need for different levels of facilitation in order appropriate the YouTube ecosystem and strategically readdress it toward more participatory use. However, the PV community of practice has barely begun to scratch the surface in terms of making use of the affordances of digital culture. Conversely, it is safe to say that while participatory producers of digital video have benefited from the enhanced opportunities for distribution, lobbying or training online, it has been difficult to employ the patterns of collective production which still remain at the core of PV as a practice.

The reluctance in some cases of leading PV practitioners to incorporate online dynamics within the core social process of PV experiences might therefore go beyond mere inertia, and instead can be linked to a desire to maintain the values embedded in current practice in a new environment, particularly in relation to PV as a collective practice. Smartphones and tablets are perceived to be,

designed to be operated and enjoyed by one person at a time, and that, in turn, is how we understand and relate to them [. . .] It’s difficult to work collectively around a mobile device in the same way as around a camcorder. (Benest, 2015)

At best, digital technology is perceived ambivalently:

On the one hand, it seems to assist a process of popular appropriation in relation to video, on the other, it banalizes and commercializes its potential. It turns video into a pocket toy, linking it to social media patterns that consolidate established circles and a logic of private, individual consumption. (A. Bougleux, personal communication, 2014)

Technological conditions, as well as the nature of the PV experience itself, might actually determine whether using digital and online resources is an option at all. For instance, rural or isolated communities might not feel that posting the results of a PV experience on YouTube is particularly beneficial if they do not have regular access to the Internet. On the contrary, communities committed to the preservation of indigenous language and culture have found YouTube extremely helpful in their attempt to reach out to dispersed indigenous groups, as well as in the promotion of their efforts beyond participant communities. ³

Conclusion

There is little doubt that the emergence of digital video (along with new possibilities for production, editing, and circulation offered by online smartphones and video platforms) represents a significant transformation of the cultural ecosystem where PV experiences have developed since the late 1960s. Reactions within the PV community of practice have ranged from self-preservation to caution, enthusiasm as well as more pragmatic views. Well-established PV organizations such as Insightshare have tended to defend PV methodology, looking to protect the integrity of a participatory culture that values collective practice at every level, even when this means a clash with hegemonic production and distribution patterns. Other actors have instead opted to incorporate and celebrate the opportunities offered by digital, online video, while at the same time trying to preserve perceived key aspects of the PV methodology. Cellphilms represent an illustrative example of such a position. Finally, it is peripheral actors, such as Ubiqa, who seem to more clearly foreground the radical transformation operated within pre-digital participatory cultures by online video, particularly when it comes to the role played by collectivities within cultural production. The kind of participatory methodology championed by Ubiqa shifts collective practice from the idea of a cooperatively made video (clearly present in ‘analogue’ PV methodology where the camera is shared, consensus is highly valued, and interaction is facilitated in order to foster democratic group dynamics) toward the act of sharing, where individuals contribute their own views to a more fragmentary creative space that responds to an accumulative logic. The collective logic of such an exercise is further reinforced by making resources widely available to the whole of the community. This is an enormously relevant shift as it deeply transforms the logics operating at the very center of pre-digital participatory cultures.

The way that the PV community has negotiated and, to some extent, resisted online dynamics of production, edition, and reception foregrounds the difference between the way the term ‘participatory’ has been used in relation to video practices on the Internet, particularly in the case of YouTube, and its meaning in the context of a PV setup where a clear commitment to political awareness and social change remains a defining element. That is not to deny that networked communities have not had a role to play in processes of social transformation. It does not follow, however, that online participation is a sufficient condition for civic engagement. This suggests that concepts such as ‘participatory culture’, ‘prosumers’, or ‘co-creation’ need a thorough critical examination in order to reframe the conditions under which different kinds of participation occur in online environments. In doing so, we suggest that terms such as ‘participation’ and ‘civic engagement’ (whether online or offline) cannot be alienated from their political commitment to social transformation, justice, inclusion, and empowerment. The act of amplifying voices and technologically contributing toward the democratization of audiovisual means of expression, while relevant, progressive phenomena, do not equate or automatically eradicate the importance of social dynamics that remain key to PV experiences. More so, if participation is capitalized on by a private platform that constantly reinforces existing inequalities whether through its own algorithm or through subsequent platform redesigns that have consistently downplayed community features on the site in order to promote the establishment of more homogeneous groups based on the idea of individual engagement (see Dias da Silva, 2012: 92). In this sort of ‘participatory culture’, individually voicing one’s concerns could even become a profoundly non-participatory course of action, contributing to the further fragmentation of the public sphere where different communities interact. Tying up digital resources to collective spaces for debating an action seems to be a challenge that PV practitioners need to address if they want their practice to remain socially significant in the times of YouTube.