Thanks for Watching

Front matter

THANKS FOR WATCHING

AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL STUDY OF VIDEO SHARING ON YouTube

Patricia G. Lange

CHAPTER 1: Introduction

CHAPTER 2: YouTube Initiation: Participating through a Camera CHAPTER 3: Growing Closer: Sharing Time and Space

CHAPTER 4: Syncing Up through Reciprocity

CHAPTER 5: What Defines a Community?

CHAPTER 6: Portals to the Posthuman

CHAPTER 7: Living with Arrhythmia: Prospects for Renewal CHAPTER 8: Conclusion

Notes References Index vii

107 145 187 225 253 283

309 339

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am deeply grateful to my husband, Andrew Lange, and to my children, Catherine and Alexander, for their steadfast support of my projects. I also wish to thank my parents, Jay and Lilia Gonzalez, as well as my sister, Leah Jarlsberg, and my brother, Michael Gonzalez, for their lifelong encouragement. Special thanks also to Chris Jarlsberg for his support. Thanks to the Lange clan, especially Janet and Jay Lange, as well as Colin Lange, Tessa Tinney, and Jonathan Lange.

I wish to extend thanks to Virginia Kuhn, Holly Willis, Gabriel Peters-Lazaro, and all the staff of the Institute for Multimedia Literacy at the University of Southern California (USC), for their encouragement. I am grateful also to USC’s Department of Anthropology. I would like to acknowledge the encouragement I received from Nancy Lutkehaus and Jenny Cool. Special thanks also to Lanita Jacobs for her friendship and support.

I am grateful to the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation for its support of my research on YouTube. For their intellectual inspiration and leadership, I wish to thank Mimi Ito and the late Peter Lyman. Thanks also to Wesley Shrum, Executive Director of Ethnografilm 2014. For encouraging my filmmaking endeavors, I would like to thank Heather Horst. Special thanks to Bonnie Nardi for her generous mentorship.

I am grateful to my colleagues at California College of the Arts (CCA) for their support of my work. I would like to thank Stephen Beal, Tammy Rae Carland, Tina Takemoto, Emily McVarish, Tirza Latimer, Juvenal Acosta, Kim Anno, J viii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Carter, Mitchell Schwarzer, Jackie Francis, Max Leung, Rebekah Edwards, Stuart Kendall, Ignacio Valero, Barry Katz, Jeanette Roan, Beth Mangini, and Brook Hinton. Special thanks also to Teri Dowling and Bobby White. At the Columbus College of Art & Design, I’d like to extend my thanks to Melanie Corn for her support. At the San Francisco Art Institute, I would like to acknowledge the support of Rachel Schreiber.

From fields ranging from media studies to filmmaking to video blogging, I would like to thank Henry Jenkins, Michael Wesch, Howard Rheingold, Mindy Faber, Jean Burgess, Joshua Green, Ryanne Hodson, Jay Dedman, Micki Krimmel, Michael Verdi, Steve Woolf, Zadi Diaz, Markus Sandy, Alicia Shay, Mike Ambs, Roxanne Darling, Lan Bui, Vu Bui, Jen Proctor, Rick Rey, Eric Rey, Kent Nichols, and Jonathan McIntosh.

I wish to thank all the people of YouTube who participated in my ethnographic research project and who contributed videos that provided insight on sharing the self through media. I would like to express my special thanks to OhCurt for making me feel welcome to YouTube and encouraging me to keep the camera rolling. Special thanks also to robtran, whose commentary about community and its limits provided crucial insight about our increasingly posthuman condition. Thanks to Joe “Mystery Guitar Man” Penna for his kind support of the project. I would also like to acknowledge the support and enthusiasm of thetalesend and ZenArcher, bright spirits who truly made a difference to the YouTube community and whose presence is greatly missed.

At the University of Michigan, I would like to thank Conrad Kottak, Bruce Mannheim, and Ruth Behar for their intellectual inspiration and generous support. I am also extremely grateful for interactions I have had over the years with Jan English-Lueck and Chuck Darrah at San José State University.

I am also grateful to Julie LaFramboise and our mutual friend for providing emotional support and friendship while juggling research and motherhood. I cherish our friendship deeply!

As a long-term San Francisco Bay Area resident, I wish to thank the friends who made Los Angeles seem like a magical place while I lived and worked there. I would like to thank Ann-Marie and Keith Fine, Jenny and David Madariaga, and Rose and Behram Parekh.

For attending my preview screening at CCA and encouraging my filmmaking, I would like to thank Sally Rayn, Brian Cheu, Padric McCaig, Eric Share, and the intrepid attendees from Platypus: the CASTAC Blog, notably Jordan Kraemer and Michael Scroggins. CASTAC stands for the Committee for the Anthropology of Science and Technology, a division of the American Anthropological Association.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Special thanks also to Gwen Dewar and Adrienne Young for sharing many anthropological insights. For their contribution to the field of media studies and their kind support, I wish to thank Annette Markham and Theresa Senft.

I also wish to acknowledge the ongoing support of my friends Chris and Jan Cooke, Kevin Carter and Che Johnson, and Matthew Carhart and Matthew DeCoster.

Thanks to all the members of the Bay Area Anthropology and Philosophy Group and the Dumbarton Circle, especially Melissa Cefkin, Mazyar Lotfalian, and Shreeharsh Kelkar, for helping participants to deepen our knowledge about the philosophical roots of anthropology.

I wish to thank the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and suggestions. Thanks also to the entire team at the University Press of Colorado for their care and attention to my book. Finally, I wish to thank my editor, Charlotte Steinhardt. I am grateful for her guidance in helping to bring this book into its final form.

THANKS FOR WATCHING

For many people, YouTube is a website for watching wacky videos. For the people profiled in this book, YouTube is a state of mind. It is not just a video-sharing website but rather a perspective that welcomes video makers of all abilities into a mediated, social space. Even with its challenges in hostile audiences and policies privileging commercialization, interviewees characterized the YouTube experience as much more than posting videos. People forging social ties considered themselves part of a YouTube community by interpersonally sharing videos on topics that were important to them.

People in this self-identified community came from many walks of life, including office administrators, technical writers, nurses, homemakers, social workers, comedians, documentarians, and actors. They connected in order to have fun and improve the craft of making videos. YouTube participants—defined here as those who posted comments or videos—became friends through the media they made and the experiences they shared. Themes that helped people connect included everything from mourning a loss to sharing excitement about the personal and social benefits of making and globally distributing one’s own media. The idea of “YouTube” is analyzed the way many YouTubers saw it—as an attitude about what it means to engage democratically through video.

After opening to the public in December 2005, YouTube enabled creators to share their vernacular, pre-professional, or professional voice through video. The site quickly moved toward commercialization in 2007 with the addition of ads and monetized partnerships. Popular media makers were exclusively invited into the partnership program.’ The monetization effort expanded in late 20077 to allow applications to the program and again in 2012, enabling anyone to monetize single videos.’ It was restricted in 2017“ and again in 2018 in favor of larger, ad-friendly creators.’ Interviewees did not necessarily perceive monetization as incompatible with sociality, but the way monetization rolled out negatively impacted some YouTubers who became disenchanted and left the site. Nevertheless, interviewees in the study often remained connected to their YouTube friends—even after migrating to other social media.

This book deals with a concept of “YouTube” as an orienting framework for people socially interacting through videos and other social media. When YouTube participants gathered in person, they recorded their activities with an eye toward posting and enjoying the videos online. Back on YouTube, viewing meet-up footage encouraged people to interact again in person so that YouTube’s connotations threaded online and off in a “mediascape,”¢ often in cyclical ways.

Thanks for Watching uses an anthropological approach to explain how interpersonal dynamics are mediated through video. Anthropologists often make the familiar strange and the strange familiar. To those who see it as a familiar video-watching site, the concept of YouTube in this book may seem strange; it functioned socially for people. Given that so many people from around the world of different ages and types were vlogging, they sometimes playfully referred to YouTube in a way that was analogous to a fictional country with its own customs and values called “YouTubia.”’ To those who feel that sharing so much of the self through video is strange, the book empathetically examines why personal media-sharing practices were so compelling. As a media-shy person, I initially considered such intimate sharing odd and discomforting, and thus my perspective resonates with the more traditional anthropological approach of studying lifeways that are distinct from one’s own.* During a multiyear project, I became a YouTuber and participated in a video-sharing culture to understand its rhythms and sociality. Although I never disclosed highly personal information, I did share videos about one personal passion—the anthropological study of video-sharing practices. Over the course of the project, I came to appreciate why people bonded through video.

This book’s title— Thanks for Watching: An Anthropological Study of Video Sharing on YouTube—reflects how I, as an anthropologist, analyzed YouTube’s participatory dynamics. It also examines found visual materials from YouTubers who produced video blogs (vlogs) in ways that articulated their goals and dreams for YouTube’s participatory and social potential. On YouTube the term “participation” exhibits various meanings.’ For YouTubers, participation often dynamically moved from watching to commenting and eventually to making and sharing videos. Although interviewees believed that even non-video-making activities such as commenting were community-building, a strong social pull existed for YouTube participants to make their own videos and share their individual perspectives.

YOUTUBE’S CULTURAL INFLUENCE

YouTube is a massive and ever-changing entity. Since videos come and go every minute, no two instantiations of YouTube are ever the same. Policies about monetization and privacy also continually change—sometimes reportedly without warning or explanation. What remains consistent is its popularity and sustained cultural influence. YouTube's participatory statistics are staggering. Founded by former employees of the online payment system PayPal in 2005, YouTube was purchased by Google for an estimated $1.65 billion in 2006." As of 2007, six hours of video were uploaded to the site every minute." Receiving 1 billion monthly visitors by 2013,” YouTube continues to see dramatic increases in video postings and viewership. In 2017, YouTube viewers were watching 1 billion hours of video per day, a figure that threatens to surpass television viewing time.” By 2017, 400 hours of video were uploaded every minute to the site,"* which represents four times the amount of video uploaded in 2013.” According to the Pew Research Center, YouTube is the second most used social networking site, behind only Facebook. In a 2014 study of US internet usage, Pew reported that 77 percent of adult internet users participated on Facebook, compared with 63 percent who used YouTube. YouTube was also far more popular than LinkedIn (25 percent) or Twitter (21 percent).

Pew’s statistics suggest that YouTube maintains a strong position in the public imagination. However, such generalized statistics tell only part of the story. When we ethnographically examine YouTubers’ individual stories, we see that ultimately the idea of YouTube is many things to different people. Many viewers use it to relax and watch funny videos. Other YouTube participants use it to professionalize creative work, learn how to make videos, and to socialize. Even to a single individual, YouTube’s multiple connotations change at different times in life, a fact that is revealed by the temporal approach taken in this book. Sometimes YouTube participation means watching videos alone; during hard times it involves telling painful stories to connect with others dealing with similar circumstances.

Mass media have largely presented only a partial view of YouTube that emphasizes its viral, profit-centric, video-of-the-week fare. Past scholarly assessments of YouTube have similarly focused on topics such as popular videos, prospects for monetization, and YouTube “stars.” It is difficult to think about YouTube without picturing funny viral videos. In scholarly presentations in which I include YouTube video clips, viewers often have trouble recognizing quiet vlogs as true YouTube videos. During my talks I have been bewildered by the question of why my presentation contains no clips of YouTube videos with piano-playing cats or boys with lasers in their garages!

Although exploring the impact of virality and celebrity culture is important, the standard focus on the site’s outrageous forms impacts how public discourse is shaped to deal with vernacular video voices. YouTube greatly facilitates promoting crass and outré videos, making it difficult for scholars to locate and discuss everyday vernacular work. Mass media and news sources focus on the most outrageous examples and use denigrating and dismissive language in a way that comparatively showcases their own assumed professionalism and levels of quality vis-a-vis the vernacular. For example, as media scholar Henry Jenkins has stated, if news outlets only ever quote silly or disturbing videos instead of thoughtful ones, such a choice helps identify the news program or other professional media as exhibiting superior quality in comparison to vernacular messages.” Professional media discourse often obscures views of YouTube that are thoughtful, insightful, and compelling for the story of human mediation.

Popular discourses have so thoroughly focused on crassness, comedy, and video virality that viewers have difficulty accepting contemplative videos as authentic

“YouTube videos.” Yet many YouTubers are often productively self-reflective and eloquent about their life experiences. Popular works tend to drown out subtle videos of sociality that have always been a cornerstone of the site. Thanks for Watching shines a light on everyday video statements and, more importantly, the processes by which people create and share them.

THE GOALS OF THIS BOOK

YouTube may have started life as a “visual repository,’ but its uses for sociality and learning have considerably expanded. The first major goal of this book is to analyze everyday media practices by offering a behind-the-scenes look at videos produced by people who formed a community of video enthusiasts. Unlike prior studies, it provides an analytical account that moves beyond the site itself and critically examines not just videos but practices that people engage with over time, including meeting up in person. By moving beyond the ’Tube and taking a temporal approach that examines interactive dynamics, the book illustrates just how deeply media are intertwined with contemporary sociality.

In anthropology it has long been acknowledged that it is not possible to study a whole culture. A research project can reveal only what anthropologist James Clifford called a “partial truth” of a vast cultural world.” This book can present only a partial view of YouTube—but one that crucially offers an “alternative narrative”

to the dominant YouTube celebrity and monetization stories.” Although a few YouTube stars make cameos when analytically appropriate, this book focuses on people who shared an interest in improving their craft and found it meaningful to socialize with other YouTubers. The stories told here are just as true as those that emphasize video virality and celebrity, but they provide a lasting alternative narrative because they challenge common assumptions about how mediated sociality works. Making media is now inseparable from experiencing and even creating many of the events that we are trying to mediate.

Anthropological concepts such as participant-observation, reciprocity, and community were originally developed through the study of small-scale societies. A second goal of this book is to investigate whether such theoretical concepts resonate in the highly technologized and mediated idiom of YouTube. The book argues that many of these concepts still apply, but in new form. In some cases the concepts have been re-theorized within anthropology itself and take on different connotations and meanings. In other cases video-sharing dynamics invite reformulations of anthropological concepts. For example, anthropologists who studied cyborg anthropology in the 1990s explored the intimate way in which technologies are integrated into the body and influence life. This book elaborates on this project and investigates whether we are entering a “posthuman” era in terms of humans’ deep involvement with technology. Although anthropologists continue to study humans, immersion in technological forms often subjectively yields discomforting as well as connective posthuman experiences that this book examines.

By studying YouTube sociality anthropologically, the third goal of this book is to take seriously how temporalities frame and influence mediated interaction. Many media studies focus on identity work and self-presentation by examining videos at a single point in time—a framework that has productively analyzed mediation. However, this book takes a different approach by focusing on temporal patterns and how they provide clues about culturally influenced interaction. Rather than only interpreting video content, this book’s rubric takes into account processes of video sharing. It concentrates on patterns of participation over time and analyzes how people deepen their sociality, deal with tensions on the site, and use publicly temporal orientations to create a shared sense of history within a concept of “YouTube.”

YOUTUBE’S PARTICIPATORY RHYTHMS

How might one meet the challenge of studying a concept of YouTube ethnographically and anthropologically? This book draws on several modes of visual production and digital participation to identify key interactive rhythms that subtly operate amid a heterogeneous mass of visual images and comments. It analyzes these rhythms and patterns and how they play out to examine how we use media not just to express the self but to show our affection for others.

Analyzing behavioral rhythms is important for understanding cultural organization and conflict. Philosopher and sociologist of everyday life, Henri Lefebvre used an approach that he termed “rhythmanalysis” to encourage attention to cultural rhythms and their origins and effects. His rubric inspires this book’s approach, which involves developing sensitivity toward appreciating life’s rhythms, processes, conflicts, and temporalities and their meanings in everyday life.” Lefebvre’s rubric has proven especially useful for exploring nontraditional forms of ethnography and their loci of study.” The current project is not concerned with addressing all of Lefebvre’s terms but rather draws inspiration from his rubric to see how rhythms and various trajectories of media-making influence participation in digital milieus.

For Lefebvre, rhythm was present whenever there was “interaction between a place, a time and an expenditure of energy.’ He was particularly concerned with examining repetitions of actions, determining whether behavioral trajectories were linear or cyclical, and analyzing how actions exhibited temporal stages, including

“birth, growth, peak, then decline and end.”” Similarly, this book will follow one Lefebvrian cycle for a social group that came together on the site. It traces how they moved from initiation to intensification of participation. It analyzes how YouTubers reached a peak of sociality through perceived community formation but saw participatory decline and ruptures through monetization, haters, death, and digital migration. The book also supplements the Lefebyrian rubric by examining prospects for rebirth or renewal as creators returned from video-making hiatuses or envisioned new sites that more closely mapped to their idea of a useful, socially oriented, video-sharing platform.

Video-sharing practices exhibit multiple experiential temporalities. The term temporality “designates how beings experience such processual qualities in different sociocultural contexts.”** Rhythms of interaction occur at several layers of analysis, including the micro level of response to a single video. For example, YouTubers believed that in social-sharing circles, a video's most intensive viewership—or what this book calls its pace of receptive vitality—is usually a few days; most commentary and views tended to appear within that window. An activity’s timing is important and exhibits specific meanings. A comment posted in the first blush of a video's posting may be read quite differently than the same comment posted years later.

Rhythms occur at broader levels of observation as well. Online sites often have a participatory rhythm that begins with contributors’ initial excitement, moves to intensive participation, and invites feelings of connection. Yet participants may ultimately experience disillusionment after problems ensue and more popular services emerge.” Sometimes sites become associated with older populations, and young people migrate to media with more youthful connotations. Sites emerge, enjoy intensive use, and ultimately fade from supporting a critical mass. They may even be shut down, thus effectively dying.

Humans and media exhibit both similar and distinctly different rhythmic patterns, which are punctuated by diverse forms of beginnings and endings. Humans, for instance, have a linear life trajectory. We are born, meet new people, have experiences, and die. Digital media, however, enable parts of us to continue as representations possibly in perpetuity, thus existing long past the human life-cycle rhythm. The perpetuation of media enables us to become “posthuman,” such that alternative versions of ourselves, or our “alters, live on. These asymmetrical temporalities and desires for our alters’ futures create tensions that are analyzed in this book. While some video makers hope their media will linger forever, others prefer it to be terminated in a contemporaneous way with the end of their life cycle. Attending to varied rhythms and their tension points enables insight into human mediation.

Rhythm analysis reveals nuances of “participation,” a word that characterizes how people engage in creative production on social media sites. The book explains how mediated rhythms influence specific characterizations of participation on YouTube. It analyzes how interactive tensions may emerge when participatory rhythms are, in

Lefebvre’s terms, “polyrhythmic”** or operate according to multiple cultural beats. For example, some people encourage other YouTubers to subscribe to their videos right away. Since YouTube’s opening in 2005 and continuing to 2018, to subscribe to another YouTuber has simply meant pressing a Subscribe button for a particular video maker and then being alerted at no cost when new videos from that creator are posted. Other creators resented such immediate demands for reciprocity and preferred to “discover” videos in their own time. Polyrhythmic differences in video viewing could result in “arrthymias” or asymmetrical rhythms that translated into participatory pathologies and conflicts. Understanding cultural and social rhythms and patterns offers an insightful way to anthropologically examine how interactive opportunities and tensions might be addressed to broaden participation, sociality, and knowledge exchange through media.

To develop his ideas, Lefebvre philosophically gazed out of his window to observe lively rhythms of behavior on local Parisian streets. Similarly, scholars may productively identify how people perceive rhythms of mediated life and analyze the meanings of alternatively harmonious and conflicting rhythms in everyday interaction online. But we need to do more than “look out the window” or, in this case, glance at our screens and “watch” or “read” YouTube videos. To gain a deeper understanding, it is beneficial to participate directly within circles of sociality. Participating in networked groups involves meeting people, as well as recording and sharing digital media, in order to experience the effects of mediation in YouTube-centric, social milieus.

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PRIOR SCHOLARLY APPROACHES

By analyzing and mediating a concept of YouTube, the book joins an ongoing scholarly conversation that initially sought to analyze YouTube by “reading” and “watching” videos on the site. In their book (first published in 2009 and updated in 2018), media scholars Jean Burgess and Joshua Green engaged in close readings of a survey of thousands of popular videos on the site.” They identified key patterns that emerged within the first few years of YouTube’s launch. They focused on how YouTube was structured as a media system and how it related to commercial media. Their foundational text insightfully lays out key debates and challenges that YouTube participants and YouTube as an entity faced, including disruptions to old media and cultural politics.

Using a method that also concentrates on video content, communication scholar Anandam Kavoori approached this terrain by “reading” and conceptualizing YouTube videos and their related discourse (including comments) in order to produce a thought-provoking taxonomy.” Kavoori focused on the viral aspect of YouTube, including how videos promote and organize celebrity culture and how such culture shapes future experiences. For example, watching viral videos about childhood begins to shape our experiential understanding of childhood itself.

While Kavoori was concerned with “reading” videos, communication and media scholar Michael Strangelove “watched” YouTube to investigate its social uses.*! He analyzed issues of great interest to this book, including investigating prospects for community and challenging the online and offline dichotomy. This book shares Strangelove’s philosophy of approaching vernacular video not in terms of judgments about supposedly failed quality, but rather taking these works and interactions “seriously” and studying them “sympathetically” as part of life. His goal is to understand videos’ cultural role, a move that follows a larger trajectory in communication and media studies. I agree with Strangelove that ultimately “an amateur video on YouTube should be analyzed not merely as a text but as a process,” in part because video meanings relate to community interactions and responses.” Thanks for Watching studies processes of video making and sharing in a central way.

In addition to media scholarship, this book continues a decades-long tradition of digital ethnography in which researchers become part of an online community and observe interaction to analyze patterns of sociality.* Recent examples of this approach from anthropologists include Tom Boellstorff’s Coming of Age in Second Life (2008), which studied key aspects of online culture, including racism, sexism, commercialization, relationships, and antisocial behavior within the digital environment of Second Life. In contrast, the present study engaged with people both online and at in-person gatherings to see how video making was processual and interwoven across different media modalities. Another anthropologically motivated digital ethnography is Bonnie Nardi’s My Life as a Night Elf Priest (2010), which explores cultural and gaming dynamics such as sexism and addiction to the game of World of Warcraft. My book Kids on YouTube (2014) focuses on how young people used the site to learn participatory skills and to develop a technologized identity. In contrast to works that analyze identity formation using digital media, Thanks for Watching examines adults’ participatory dynamics through the interactive choices they make to accomplish video sociality.

Thanks for Watching departs from prior approaches in terms of its detailed attention to the video-making process, including discussing dynamics such as interpersonal reciprocities and migratory patterns into and out of the site. This book investigates how the acts of making and sharing videos are situated within a larger interactive field that includes varying levels of mediation and participation. In contrast to many prior works in digital environments, Thanks for Watching is less centrally concerned with identity formation through media creation than it is with analyzing how video creation and sharing support or challenge mediated sociality. The focus is not solely on reading or watching videos but on participating directly over time and attending carefully to how interaction and interwoven modalities influence the dynamics of a particular cultural group.

ETHNOGRAPHIC APPROACH

Thanks for Watching lies at the intersection of digital media studies and visual anthropology, an interdisciplinary terrain that some scholars refer to as “digital visual anthropology.’™ In addition to examining digital milieus and participating across modalities, the book also draws on traditional visual anthropology approaches as outlined by anthropologists Jay Ruby and Richard Chalfen. Under this rubric visual anthropology includes one or more of the following: (1) recording or collecting visual materials of people, things, and events to analyze human behavior (in this case recording observations and interviews); (2) studying found visual artifacts (in this case YouTube videos); and (3) using visual media to present data and research findings (in this case vlogs and a feature-length video). Anthropologists Howard Morphy and Marcus Banks argue that visual anthropology is not just a method for interpreting visual materials but also enables analyzing visual systems and visual cultural forms.’ A key line of evidence includes studying YouTubers’ own videos, which reveal how they are “expert witnesses” of their mediated experiences.*” According to anthropologists Nancy Lutkehaus and Jennifer Cool, scholars are increasingly studying their own culture in an attempt to encourage “intelligent dialogue across ethnic, class, and cultural lines, among individuals different from one another, but who nonetheless can benefit from attempting to convey their differences”? In one sense I was studying my own culture of fellow media enthusiasts