Tag_2: Friendship, Hostility, Co-existence

YouTube is a representation of a space, in the sense of a field that is made up through the conversations that are taking place between its users.
These conversations are not only the comments on the videos but mainly the videos themselves. At the end, these conversations that are being adopted are in other words those that become the dominant ones, decide for the restriction of our perception and for that that we will finally think and understand. If as Bruno Latour claims: we have gone from a time of Time to a time of Space, from a time of succession to a time of co-existence, then the forms of these conversations that configure the space of co-existence, may consume the contributions of the users aimlessly, they may function as control points for the access and the participation through the use of methods of exclusion, or on the contrary -maybe in a utopian sense for some-, they may permit to the users to constitute the frame context of the space and by doing that, to give a meaning in their experience.
In general, the producers of social networks are using the friendship that grows between the users, in such a way so as to create nets that will be consumed, that will distribute hierarchies and power or that will be capitalised for the favor of the owners of the site. This friendship takes often a strange form because as it is based in relations of inclusion and exclusion, it permits to the user that produces them to have access in higher levels of interaction, experience and consequently to produce more relationships.
This production of relationships, in its turn maximizes the value of the system that at the end becomes a giant corp. that exploits the huge potential of peoples' affective labor; a form of labor that produces nowadays one of the most precious "spices" needed by capitalism, the creation of bonds inside the social tissue.
Labour produces not only commodities, but first and foremost the capital relationship. Capital relations are, of course, always already social relations. Social networks enable an exponential explosion of such social and economic relations. And what is also produced in these social and economic relations - indeed, what causes them to coalesce in the first place - is the production of affect. (Lazzarato, 2001)
In other words, the appearance of the friendship as a productive force at the social factories of web 2.0 means at the same time and the appearance of the hostility.
The ambiguous relations that take place between the users, in reality, they construct a battlefield corresponding to the arena like spaces of the videogames. YouTube, as a big part of the web 2.0, has the tendency to look more and more as a gamespace.