Corporate Co-optation?

Definitionally speaking, it would seem that the online community spaces provided by such web-based applications as youtube and facebook have the potential to take the democratic and public aspirations that began with the inception of public access television to a new and broader level. Take youtube for example, whose leading mantra is "broadcast yourself." Ostensibly this slogan flies in the face of the hierarchical structure imposed by a consumer society that reveres and depends on its corporate elite. However, youtube's explosion of popularity has made it a prime and formerly untapped market of an entirely new generation of consumers. Thus it seems, like the free market economy in which smaller based operations have to struggle to survive, in the free market of ideas provided by spaces like youtube, individuals have to struggle to be seen.

When I clicked on the community page on youtube, I expected to be taken to a space where videos of small children singing songs in their underwear were juxtaposed next to videos of large sweaty men spouting off their conspiracy theories in a dimly lit broom closet. However, I was instead met by a flood of video contests that were almost all sponsored by large corporations attempting to interactively sell their products and group pages that represented similarly economic interests. It seems like somehow youtube has lost the spirit in which it was conceived where broadcasting yourself means competing with gigantic corporations braodcasting their products. Indeed this seems to be the case with other seemingly community focused sites like myspace and facebook where one cannot visit without being bombarded by various advertisements catered to the information you've made public about yourself. Is public access television one of the few spaces that has not completely been co-opted by corporate interests? It seems like a possible answer to this question and an antidote to this cynicism lies in three crucially important issues: locality (as in the case of public access), specificity, and popularity.

If we look at some of the other links provided here, like vimeo and crying while eating, we don't see the same sort of coporate representation found on sites like youtube. I think perhaps this is due to the comparatively small scale at which these sites operate. Until today I had never heard of vimeo (perhaps this might have something to do with the fact that it has never been used as a space for submitting questions in a presidential election...). Crying while eating is not only comparatively smaller, like vimeo, but I think maybe its specificity makes it a less enticing space for corporate interests. I'm sure that Mc Donald's or any other giant food corporation could find a way to intervene with a little product placement, but having someone crying while they use your product may not be the best representation of quality.

All in all it seems to me that with popularity comes a loss of individual user agency and therefore a loss of a site's explicitly public spirit. Perhaps if youtube wants provide a space in which individuals can really broadcast themselves, they should cease allowing corporations to be considered "selves" (even though corporations are individuals legally speaking...) and leave that designation to the people who are really seeking an online community as opposed to an online consumer market.