ABSTRACT
At the beginning of Chapter 6 , I noted that text production at the point of distribution is a characteristic of social media sites that rely on user-generated text. Chapter 6 also highlighted a number of ways in which this connection between production and distribution works in the context of YouTube, as users engage in the production of text while they are watching video, reading the text of video pages and navigating the site. When a user is signed into YouTube as a channel creator, a text cluster appears at the top right hand corner of every YouTube page representing the user’s point of access to text production tools. An ‘Upload’ button gives direct access to the page that is used to upload a video and its metadata, and a channel icon gives access to the channel’s ‘Creator Studio’, a suite of pages that are used to manage the user’s videos. Although much of the editing of a video is likely to be done offline before the video is uploaded, these pages include basic editing tools, including tools that can be used to add multimodal features to a video such as a title, annotations, cards, and windows for video and still images. These pages also provide tools to manage the content of video pages and channel pages after they have been created.
