<p>This article provides a genre analytical approach to creating a typology of the User Generated Content (UGC) of YouTube. The article investigates the construction of navigationprocesses on the YouTube website. It suggests a pragmatic genre approach that is expanded through a focus on YouTube’s technological affordances. Through an analysis of the different pragmatic contexts of YouTube, it is argued that a taxonomic understanding of YouTube must be analysed in regards to the vacillation of a user-driven bottom-up folksonomy and a hierarchical browsing system that emphasises a culture of competition and which favours the already popular content of YouTube. With this taxonomic approach, the UGC videos are registered and analysed in terms of empirically based observations. The article identifies various UGC categories and their principal characteristics. Furthermore, general tendencies of the UGC within the interacting relationship of new and old genres are discussed. It is argued that the utility of a conventional categorical system is primarily of analytical and theoretical interest rather than as a practical instrument.</p>

This chapter investigates paratexts and their functionality on YouTube. It is argued that YouTube content is in fact characterized by its dependence and usage of paratexts as part of YouTube's infrastructure. Paratexts are presented as being either auto-generated by YouTube or created by its users. They are furthermore identified through a distinction between spatial and temporal relationships. Based on these distinctions, a small survey of some of the most popular videos on YouTube is conducted in order to examine the appearance and functionality of paratexts. A principal argument of the chapter is that the functionality of the paratexts can be explained by what Genette characterizes as the paratext's illocutionary force, which is examined in relationship to YouTube's paratexts and, more specifically, the site's implementation of links. The chapter also argues that paratexts may be characterized as a necessary tool for creators on YouTube to apply to what is being described as a culture of visibility in which paratexts serve both a promotional and a social purpose.

This article focuses on YouTube mashups and how we can understand them as a specific subgenre on YouTube. The Mashups are analysed as audiovisual recontextualizations that are given new meaning, e.g., via collaborative social communities or for individual promotional purposes. This is elaborated on throughout a discussion on Mashups as a mode of everyday bricolages, which are moreover discussed through a theoretical approach to Mashups as exponents of what has been called "Vernacular Creativity". The article also argues that the novelty of Mashups is not be found in its formal characteristic, but rather in its social and communicative abilities within the YouTube community. This leads to the article's overall argument that the main characteristic of the YouTube Mashup can be explained in terms of connectivity. It is argued that Mashups reveal a double articulation of connectivity; one that involves the social mechanisms of the Mashups, and another mode, which concerns the explicit embedding of structural connectivity that accentuates the medium-specific infrastructure of YouTube. This double articulation of connectivity is furthermore elaborated on by including Grusin and Bolter's concept of remediation.Methodologically, the article draws on empirical observations and examples of Mashups are included to demonstrate the article's main arguments.

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