Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University, gave a talk at the Library of Congress about YouTube and its role in the participatory culture. He explains how one of his videos, Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us, became very popular in just a few days and how this popularity took him by surprise. The video was remixed, translated, it was the starting point for a conversation at a global level.
To find how people communicate on YouTube, Professor Wesch and his students studied YouTube and the way anonymity, interactivity, authenticity and popularity define it as a new medium for community.