ABSTRACT
When YouTube is viewed from the perspective of design , it is essentially a framework of templates and resources for the production of text by YouTube users. This chapter turns to the production of this text, often called user-generated content, which is seen as being distinct from the design of the site and its pages in a way that Kress and van Leeuwen’s (2001) account may not envisage. Kress and van Leeuwen (2001) illustrate the distinction between design and production with the analogy of an architect who designs but does not build a house. The architectural design that the builder works with, however, is one that has already been imbued with semantic content. This content may even precede the design of the house in the brief that the architect has received from the client. A builder, in other words, builds a particular building and, although the process of production may modify the meanings of the architectural design, these meanings are in some sense already present in the design. In the case of YouTube and other social media sites that rely on user-generated content, on the other hand, there is a much more formal separation of the phases of design and production, in regard to content and authorship. YouTube designs the YouTube page, but this is not a design for a particular page with particular meaning. It is the users of the site who produce the substantive texts that make the meaning of one page different from the meaning of others.
