ABSTRACT
The rise of social network media has brought about a fundamental change in how audience members position themselves toward media. Although social network platforms are mainly used for interpersonal communication purposes, they also enable mass communication. Hence, the once rigid relation between sender/broadcaster and audience/receiver is increasingly pressured by Web platforms that allow users to position themselves as senders as well. In this chapter, we focus on the video sharing website YouTube, one of the most popular online platforms that afford such broadcaster-audience reversals. With a daily increment of over 150,000 new, mostly user-generated videos, a massive audio-visual database is now readily available for the Internet population.
