8
Conclusion
Thanks for Watching analyzed YouTube sociality. To conduct this research, I became a member of video-mediated, social milieus. Of particular importance was not only watching videos and reading discourse but also participating in the process of media creation as it occurred and as it influenced interactional dynamics. In addition to analyzing video artifacts and observing the ways in which people interacted on YouTube, I also attended gatherings across the United States, camera in hand. I became another voice that contributed to recording a concept of “YouTube” as a state of mind—one that reached beyond the parameters of a website or corporate entity. Rather, it became a feeling tone and organizing framework for sociality with connotations of friendship, fun, and participatory tensions. Participating on YouTube also influenced my scholarship, as I received the personal encouragement to practice video-making skills and create vlogs and an ethnographic film—experiences that deepened my understanding of nuanced video sharing and interaction.
YouTubers’ experiences alternatively ratified, expanded, or challenged the extent to which traditional anthropological concepts applied in this digital milieu. In general, most terms apply, although some must be expanded in socially oriented video-making groups. For example, the figure of the chronotope, which collapses the notion of time and place in ways that are meaningful to video makers, helped contextualize how YouTubers created a shared sense of history. This study expanded on this concept by introducing the notion of chronotopic chains of experience. For instance, two YouTubers reenacted taking a video selfie in a way that self-consciously echoed the same activity at a prior gathering, thus inter-threading and problematizing binary notions of online and offline interaction. They created a chronotopic chain of interaction that offered emotional connection and intertwined their personal histories with that of YouTube.
In other cases the particular parameters of video mediation invited reconsideration of anthropological critiques of controversial concepts such as posthumanism, participant-observation, community, and reciprocity. Posthuman configurations involving technical and social factors intersect with the limitations of human characteristics to yield experiential rather than strictly corporeal posthuman instantiations. Amid the condition of posthumanity, it is increasingly important to honor individual voices. Attending to nonfamous YouTube participants is especially important given algorithmic implementations that complicate video makers’ ability to craft their personal and public video statement. Creators may experience posthuman tremendum, which refers to the feelings of awe and fear of their media being out of control in technologized ways. Posthuman tremendum may be especially acute when one’s individual data are recognizably depersonalized and aggregated to fulfill corporate or policy agendas. For all the claims of having narcissistic control over media, people do not always have the control they desire. Given how other video makers may manipulate and drown out one’s voice, it may be necessary to give quieter voices far more rather than less attention through media. Conversely, posthuman media collectives may offer a sense of comfort and connection, as individuals in group formations feel a sense of disquietude when a constituent inexplicably disappears from socially integrated configurations.
Critics of participant-observation suggest that it is an outdated and sad oxymoron. The study invited reconsideration of these critiques in light of how interacting with a camera and participating while observing often became a key aspect of YouTube sociality. Skeptics argue that it is not possible to fully participate in sociality if one is engaged in the detached, reflective observation required to analyze behavior. Yet for some video activities, observing through a camera constituted robust and meaningful participation simultaneously; indeed, they constituted the same act. Certainly we must all decide what to mediate and when in terms of ethics and interpersonal sociality. However, for mediated activities such as vlogging, it is not possible to reasonably speak of separating participation and observation. Further, the data show how these critiques risk reifying Cartesian binaries that assert a mind-body split in which it is assumed that one cannot engage both the body and mind simultaneously. As seen in the “playful paparazzi” incident in chapter 2, observing through a camera was an important way in which YouTubers and vloggers bonded by providing supportive attention to the nonfamous and nonstereotypically sexualized media object.
Notions of “community” produced controversy on the site—which is perhaps not surprising given the term’s overdetermined meanings in the anthropological record. Clearly, the concept retains widespread rhetorical force as evidenced by several lines of data, including interviewees’ remarks, YouTubers’ own videos, and the commentary that flooded videos on the subject. Rather than ignoring such a fraught concept, the term community is better conceptualized as processual rather than categorical. It will quite likely remain in flux as long as new media generations arrive and grapple with what the term connotes to them and others whom they encounter. Working through notions of community means that, rather than eschewing anonymity, constituents will need to work with unknown others in order to build coalitions of shared interests and activities. When understood temporally, it is clear that accepting and dealing with initial anonymity is a necessary starting point for launching the processual activity of creating community through discourse.
YouTubers’ concept of reciprocity illustrated traditional notions as well as more recent updates in the anthropological record. Contra pundits that decry its loss, the research showed that positive forms of reciprocity are alive and well in certain digital milieu, with many YouTubers engaging in reciprocities that acknowledge their fellow video makers’ regard. The study also showed that traditional nuances of reciprocity in the anthropological record—including self-serving and negative types—were also visible on YouTube. At the same time, the study echoed theoretical reworkings of reciprocity, such as the idea that withholding certain forms of reciprocity may be as crucial for community creation and maintenance as bestowing it. The data also challenged traditional anthropological categorizations of homeomorphic versus heteromorphic forms of reciprocity in digital milieus. Drawing on prior anthropological studies, it argued that since the root of reciprocity lies in a gift from a specific person, no two gifts—however functionally similar they appear—truly qualify as homeomorphic. At root, digital forms of reciprocity discussed in the study emerge from different people with particular emotions, intended meanings, and feelings of regard.
The lessons learned about reciprocity and other anthropological concepts serve as a springboard for future discussions of how these rubrics and their temporal frames play out in different social groups on YouTube as well as outside of YouTube on other social media. For example, reports indicate that issues of reciprocity, such as mutual “liking” practices on the photo-sharing site Instagram, garner suspicion, as has happened with YouTube’s sub for sub mutual subscription pledges to watch each other’s videos. On Instagram, when people begin to “like” photos autonomically (or to use an automated program or “bot” to do so), the reciprocal action and the “like” itself may lose meaning to Instagram users.1 Timing is also crucial in the way people enact reciprocities on social media. An inadvertent “like” on an Instagram photo posted long ago may give the impression that the “liker” is “stalking” the user or being “creepy.”2
Lefebvre’s temporal focus inspired this research, which aims to produce a “history of the future.”3 As YouTube moved toward commercialization, it is important to remember how some YouTubers used the video-sharing site in more social ways. Although sociality and a monetized art world are not necessarily incompatible among creative professionals, YouTube’s choices clearly yielded deep tensions. An often-heard comment when YouTube first launched was that people should not complain about the site’s policies given that uploading and sharing videos was “free”—a philosophy that tacitly sees the relationship with YouTube as reciprocal. YouTube provides a platform and creatives supply content, generating profit that benefits everyone. However, YouTube users have since become savvy to the adage “If you’re not paying for it; you are the product.”4 In other words, free participation means agreeing to be surveilled so that targeted ads and other commercial goals may be achieved to increase profits for a select few. Case studies are needed that carefully document how people use video sites so that future user-friendly sites might reflect and support vernacular and social forms of media sharing.
Insights gleaned from this study provide important comparative material and lessons for the future as scholars examine new media generations on YouTube and other socially motivated media. Of particular importance will be handling the specific social, commercial, and technological parameters that set the stage for interaction. One solution may be to reintroduce features that facilitated sociality but were unprofitable, such as the video response feature, which provided a link to videos that addressed a prior video. This feature was deleted in 2013 due to the low click-through rate of responses.5 Although not profitable from a monetization aspect, the move prompted concern among those who felt that video responses encouraged community engagement.6 Whether design solutions lie in bringing back older features or offering new alternatives depends upon interactive needs.
New Lefebvrian cycles are emerging whose borders are tricky to adjudicate. Questions emerge such as, are the choices and behaviors exhibited from new media generations similar or different to those of other socially oriented groups on YouTube? How do these interactions compare to those on other social media sites? What behaviors carry over as people digitally migrate, and how does interaction adjust to migration patterns? A collective scholarly conversation will be required for comparing different forms of mediation across time and space. Of particular importance is analyzing nuances in video-sharing milieus and understanding participatory trajectories of vernacular work that are often ignored in official accounts of YouTube.
Alternative Narratives and Anti-Memory
YouTube is a vast entity. Each research approach is inevitably a partial view of a site that is massive, constantly changing, and difficult to conceptualize as a whole.7 It is challenging to identify pockets of meaningful discourse amid a heterogeneous social space that exhibits multiple and sometimes conflicting monetization agendas and digital literacies. Notably, alternative narratives of usage such as those found in thoughtful videos and comments are just as important as popular channels, YouTube celebrities, and viral videos—even if they do not receive splashy attention.
Moving beyond dominant discourses, we see that social media are not stable entities or neutral platforms of interaction. A temporal, long-term view reveals that social media are continually changing and that people use them in various ways across different social groups. There is no pure, stable, or best use of a particular site. For example, in the global, large-scale study of social media run by anthropologist Daniel Miller, researchers note that there is not a real or more authentic “Twitter,” just because they observed that English schoolchildren used it for friendly banter and adults used it to exchange information.8 A key aspect of their research details how use of social media sites varies according to location and demographics. These observations demonstrate the importance of attending closely to partial and emplaced views.
Miller and his colleagues did not focus on YouTube as part of their study of social media. Their understandable rationale was that although individuals as well as companies disseminate messages on the site, YouTube mostly functioned as a “form of public broadcasting.”9 However, to their point about the importance of studying media in different socio-cultural contexts, it is important to remember that although social media sites such as Twitter are now used to broadcast messages, some people still use it socially, as did the children in their study. Similarly, YouTube’s broadcast structure has not precluded social uses.
Considering the temporal dimension is crucial for analysis, given that usage frequently changes. Technology and media researcher danah boyd and information studies scholar Nicole Ellison found that social media platforms often start with specific intentions that morph over time; for instance, Cyworld was a Korean discussion forum tool but became a social network site.10 The social media site Orkut, they point out, began in the United States as an English-language site, yet later Portuguese-speaking Brazilians became the central users. Individual sites also change connotations over time. As Miller and his colleagues state, an early version of Facebook was designed so that male students could rate the attractiveness of female students. The site has changed in usage, but it is fair to ask whether the platform retains its original connotations in terms of participatory ratings that encourage competitive self-presentation. I agree with the conclusion of Miller and his team that “the usage by any one social group is no more authentic than any other.”11 Thus, even a broadcast platform such as YouTube may also facilitate sociality.
Variations in Twitter usage across different countries illustrate how a platform may move from being a social network site to a broadcast medium. Twitter is generally characterized as social media. Yet pundits argued years ago that Twitter had lost (at least among adults) its interactive tone and was mostly used by journalists and experts to disseminate information.12 Researchers have shown how Twitter shifted to privilege broadcasting messages over conversation. In 2009, merely three years after Twitter was launched,13 political philosopher Jodi Dean argued that only 5 percent of accounts were responsible for 75 percent of the tweets.14 These statistics led Dean to conclude that Twitter had become saturated with “super users” and “automated zombies.” Similarly, media scholar Jean Burgess analyzed nearly 1 billion tweets from Australia between 2006 and 2015 and concluded that although numerous tweets continue to be posted, “Twitter is becoming less conversational and more like a news platform.”15 Whether these patterns continue over time or within particular social groups is an empirical question—as Miller found in studying its use in England. What is important to acknowledge is that intensity of sociality may change over time within particular social media sites and across different social groups.
Comparative research conducted across countries and different types of social media lead to an intriguing hypothesis. Perhaps social media platforms generally begin life in more social ways, but as they age they morph into broadcast-oriented platforms as participants migrate to cooler sites? Or do groups initially engage socially, experience participatory complications, and then migrate to other sites to maintain social ties? Perhaps such dynamics are not specific to a particular medium but rather indicate a patterned cycle of mediated participation that begins with sociality and ends with broadcasting across particular demographics. Although addressing such hypotheses is beyond the scope of the present study, they prompt additional investigation of the changing timbre of sites over time. Researchers should conduct long-term studies to investigate whether social media have a certain social “shelf life” (arguably three to five years), after which they mostly offer mass broadcasting, or whether different services maintain multiple trajectories of usage according to the needs of new media generations as they arrive to a site. It is vital to study alternative narratives of social media across time and space to avoid overgeneralizing about particular technical platforms and to achieve deeper understanding of mediation patterns.
I believe there are ethical as well as research-oriented obligations to seek out and understand the dynamics of diverse, alternative narratives of usage. Noted visual anthropologist Faye Ginsburg poignantly details how mediated environments facilitate communication among the disabled, such as people with autism.16 Design is inherently political, as individuals may not always attain equitable access to mediated spaces and activities. Sites should be designed to facilitate identifying pockets of meaningful interaction on YouTube. Complaints that it is difficult to find worthwhile videos risk morphing into elitist discourses that absolve scholars and other experts from seeking out and acknowledging alternative voices. It is not sufficient to decry the difficulty of identifying relevant work. Researchers and designers must actively pursue mechanisms to identify and circulate important messages. We must find ways to “beat the algorithm,” as the YouTubers say, when certain algorithms are constructed to excessively privilege harmfully extremist messages. It is an ethical imperative to widen attention to focus on thoughtful voices beyond already-interested parties within particular communities. Under the right circumstances, alternative narratives can be civically powerful. We need to find collective ways to facilitate the design of interfaces that help diverse viewers locate and cooperate with insiders of diverse groups to learn more about their experiences and circulate their message.
Concerns about accommodating diverse media makers will likely intensify over time. “Cultural” practices on the site emerged from numerous trajectories,17 including drawing on larger cultural formations. When people arrived on YouTube, they brought their own cultural expectations and ideas about what was appropriate to share on the site. The group under study is largely from the United States, a large and heterogeneous country. Diverse norms, expectations, and practices inevitably shaped their participation and influenced video-sharing cultural practices.
The YouTube platform itself was influenced by concepts from commercial structures, which provided the environment that YouTube participants experienced when they arrived. Indeed, YouTubers encountered media syncretism on the site, in which visible mixes or blends of ideas, beliefs, and practices became part of their cultural milieu in the mediated environment of YouTube.18 Although the term “syncretism” is often used in anthropology to refer to mixed blends of religious practices, it is possible to identify media syncretism on YouTube. The site’s design clearly drew on multiple media models to form a new participatory platform. For example, YouTube drew on the idea of a “subscription” model to promote videos. As of June 2018, with the exception of specific, paid ad-free viewing and select-content services, subscriptions to individual video makers were free. Offering free subscriptions aimed to draw viewers back to the site and was thus advantageous for the corporate entity of YouTube as well as for the video maker who received more views. Subscribing viewers arguably benefited by being able to keep up to date on the latest videos of their favorite creators. At the same time, the idea of a “subscription” prepares the way for eventual paid access, which is what occurred on the site. YouTubers’ history of receiving subscriptions for free arguably problematized acceptance of paying for YouTube at all. This is an example of media syncretism, in which older ideas about media use encountered tensions within new parameters of social usage and interaction.
Scholars who study internet histories have observed that the “internet,” which was conceived as a “network of networks,” has taken on a monolithic connotative history in which a single version of its creation story is reiterated. In fact, the internet has multiple histories, false starts, and ways of usage. Media studies scholar Kevin Driscoll and information science researcher Camille Paloque-Berges argue that it is crucial to uncover and analyze varied technological trajectories. As they state, “The Internet has always been multiple.”19 One may extrapolate from their contention to argue that it is through exploring alternative narratives of usage that one may begin to appreciate everyday experiences, ethical concerns, and future prospects for designing equitable and interactive mediated spaces. Of particular interest for Driscoll and Paloque-Berges is understanding “relations of authority” or, more specifically, “who or what is authorised to be connected” or “who or what is more visible or central than others.”20 They argue that the singular history of the Net takes on a teleological quality that contends that the way “the internet” unfolded is the best way. Keeping alternative historical narratives in play, they argue, helps dismantle notions that the way that things reportedly unfolded were the “fittest” and therefore the only or right way of executing internet networks.
A similar argument may be applied to narratives of YouTube usage. A popular teleological history has taken shape in which it is deemed “inevitable” that a free video-sharing site such as YouTube would become intensely monetized and commercial and that those who are not “fit” enough to run with the pack should be left to atrophy through hard-coded features such as being banned from monetizing one’s work unless specific thresholds are reached through creation of ad-friendly content. YouTube promotes and provides significant resources to video makers who achieve celebrity, therefore creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. Of prime importance is preserving alternative narratives that challenge YouTube’s teleological story. Its history is one way that worked on a certain level, but other useful participatory trajectories that privilege sociality more centrally could also be respected and accommodated, perhaps through newly designed, alternative platforms.
We must not only remember alternative histories. We must assertively and actively “forget”—or at least de-emphasize—attention on the success stories that dominate singular, teleological narratives. This is especially true when particular histories erase important vernacular voices and interactivity. Of course, the idea is not to literally forget key events. Rather, if we take a page from the post-phenomenologists’ book,21 what is required is a kind of “anti-memory” that sets aside a particular paradigm that was successful in order to achieve a new one.22 Philosophy of technology scholar Galit Wellner draws on the work of philosopher Gilles Deleuze and psychiatrist and political activist Félix Guattari to argue that “becoming” requires “anti-memory.” In other words, “becoming does not return to a fixed past but instead orients toward an unknown future and a redefined past.”23 Wellner explains:
To start a revolution, the revolutionist needs to break away from the past just as the ancient fish had to forget the sea. In the technological realm, we have seen that the argument that cell phones cannot be used to access the internet had to be rejected in order to develop a cell phone of the third historical variation. In order to become, one needs to forget what one cannot become.24
YouTube was enormously successful; it is an online juggernaut of commercial video. We need to suspend our “knowledge” of this trajectory and temporarily “forget” its type of success if we wish to create a “history of the future” in which subsequent pockets of YouTube or new user-friendly sites may be forged with or without monetization. We need to preserve and analyze diverse YouTube alters to understand what might be possible and desirable for future video-sharing practices. Of course we cannot literally “forget” (nor would we wish to) YouTube and its tremendous influence on the cultural zeitgeist. At the same time, however, we need to suspend teleological acceptance of its deliberate choices. Proposed below are research approaches that aim to help construct an anti-memory of success within a particular context to create alternative and possibly transformative opportunities for spectacular new types of socially driven, video-mediated interaction.
A Proposed Framework for Researching Video-Sharing Cultures
YouTubers interested in sociality shared their message through videos on a site with particular constraints, conventions, and expectations about video sharing and commenting. When these experiences and norms were taken together, participatory groups on YouTube exhibited cultural patterns. Humorously referring to the site as “YouTubia” playfully showed how YouTubers encouraged sociality. Shared practices included comment and video reciprocity, subscriptions, and collab videos as well as enthusiasm for the site itself. Challenges included dealing with discomforting temporalities of change, haters, asymmetrical access to YouTube’s partnership program, and “sub for sub” mutual subscription demands, all of which contributed to distinctive cultural practices of video sharing.
Ethnographic studies of media sites may broaden participation by showing how new groups from different countries, ethnicities, and areas of interest use YouTube to accomplish their own forms of sociality. Examples include groups of people who play Minecraft, a sandbox video game in which people build things using blocky graphics. With more than 42 million videos, Minecraft became the most watched gaming title on YouTube in its history.25 Teens and young adults with high-profile accounts often record their activities and amusing commentary as they build things on the site. Information is shared, and the resulting social connections have spawned a thriving community.26 Subsequent generations of imagined communities from groups dealing with transgender issues or mental illness also use the site in multiple ways,27 and their similarities and differences in comparison with previous groups should be acknowledged and analyzed.
How might sites and the groups that use them be studied ethnographically as new generations of users appear? The following discussion offers suggestions for studying new groups as they interact within parameters that change over time. Based on the lessons learned from YouTube, this section provides proposals for studying video-sharing practices in ways that will quite likely shed analytical light on how people share the self through video and, more generally, through media as new cycles of media generations appear. Notably, media generations are not solely determined by age. Some of the early vloggers on YouTube were middle-aged adults who vlogged alongside twenty-year-olds as they shaped video-sharing conventions.
Although these recommendations originated from video sharing, they might also find use in a wide array of digital media contexts. Of course, it is not always possible to invoke all of these characteristics within a single study, nor will every parameter apply across all types of media research. Different studies will require various approaches and combinations of styles to gain insight. The following characteristics are noted because they were advantageous when studying socially motivated YouTubers. They aim to facilitate a broad range of perspectives on video sharing and other social media cultures across diverse groups and sites.
Emphasize Empathy
A cornerstone of anthropological and ethnographic investigation includes empathizing with other people. Conducting media research empathetically means exploring what media makers aim to express through form, content, and media-sharing practices. It does not mean agreeing with everyone’s choices on what to mediate and when. It simply means suspending one’s disbelief long enough to ask respectful questions about the meaning of individual practices. At the very least, it involves expressing sincere interest in why people make media, even if artifacts seem technically subpar or feel “boring” to outsiders of the interpretive communities that the media targets.28
Far too often, cultural elites dismiss vernacular media that is now part of daily life for many people. Yet everyday video has demonstrably contributed to public culture in fundamental ways. For example, Moran analyzes how vernacular aesthetics are integrated into narrative storytelling in mainstream fiction films.29 He describes how a shaky home movie in a fiction film can reveal much about a cinematic character. The aesthetics of so-called amateur video are integrated into professional works in ways that have irrevocably contributed to cultural production of media.
In addition, although some cultural critics are filmmakers themselves, it feels as though some of the most virulent critics of vernacular video have never tried to make and share media with a global public. While I do not believe that every critic should be a media-making expert, a little appreciation is in order. Making media is hard work! Those of us involved in academic video blogging can attest to the complexity, time intensiveness, and the vulnerable state one experiences when sharing ideas-in-progress with the world through video.30
Experimental psychologists argue that achieving empathy is a choice. Even the most disturbed personalities, such as diagnosed narcissists, may achieve it; they just choose not to.31 It would truly be ironic if scholars avoided developing a sense of empathy for everyday creators who are trying to have their voices heard and engage in civic dialogue. Paying inordinate attention to narcissists arguably fuels narcissism. Further, not all “boring” videos are created for the general public, even though the public has access to them. Vloggers’ reactions to critiques about video quality give rise to the concept of viewership narcissism, which may be defined as viewers’ toxically egotistical and unrealistic belief that a video should satisfy their unique preferences or it does not deserve attention. Yet videos may be banal to certain viewers because they were created for a specific group. Important aspects of content or subtle manipulations of form are lost on nontarget audiences.
Exhibiting empathy does not mean encouraging video makers to remain in stasis with regard to digital literacy skills. Nor does it require agreeing with or sanctioning inappropriate or harassing videos. However, even in such cases, it is certainly possible to use ethnography to “understand the lifeworlds of the ‘repugnant other’” to analyze antagonistic interaction patterns.32 As communication and digital technologies scholar Whitney Phillips argues, repugnant others, such as online trolls, are not as outré as is often assumed. In fact, they frequently engage with Western rhetorical practices that are fairly mainstream. Toxically aggressive messages appear, for instance, in nonanonymous, loud, and argumentative television journalism programs.33 If it is possible to use ethnography even to understand works from “repugnant others,” such as sexist, racist, and hater commentary, then surely it is possible to use empathy-driven ethnographic methods to understand why everyday creators feel that it is important to express the self through video.
Discourses of quality, in which video makers indicate a desire to improve and collaboratively share tips, routinely appear on the site.34 YouTubers display awareness of the need for digital literacies and call on global audiences to develop them. In fact, YouTubers reflecting on their experience see increasingly professional work on YouTube and a much higher quality of videos—sometimes at the expense of sociality.35
Academics may hold heterogeneous online participants to standards that they would not demand of their own students. We expect students to improve over time; why not acknowledge that video makers and commenters with varying abilities may also do so? Consider a classroom in which the effectiveness of the traditional seminar discussion format is assessed—as in many digital research studies—at a single point in time, say the students’ first papers. Deciding that the seminar format was useless because of a bad set of first papers would be absurd. Reasons for problematic papers may be numerous, including students’ initial ability when they came into a class as well as a particular professor’s facility with leading seminars. Students are mentored at least over a term with the conviction that they all may improve. Applying this pedagogical analogy, it is unduly pessimistic to judge video makers’ abilities—as well as the usability of an entire site—only at a single point in time. It is perhaps unrealistic to pronounce definitive failure in participants’ current and future ability by analyzing a few videos or comments.
YouTubers display overt awareness of their videos’ aesthetic faults and are sometimes the first to call them out. They may rhetoricize their visual literacies, which means accounting for or apologizing for aspects of their video that they feel could be improved but that are not evident in the technical execution of a video.36 For example, in one meet-up video the creator warns viewers that she might have used too many edits. Such warnings rhetoricize digital literacies by simultaneously displaying a sensitivity to the viewer as well as acknowledging that editing skills are important for making legible and interesting videos. Even though she garnered a small audience, she still felt the need to publicly express her technical knowledge about making videos. Public rhetoricizations of digital literacies were also observed among the youth whom I interviewed in Kids on YouTube (2014). Both young people and adults tend to perform their affiliations to ideas they assume to be important among video makers.
Many scholars and critics see online video making as frivolous, when in fact video-making skills are becoming increasingly important in core facets of life. Some people’s life success now depends upon demonstrating an ability to manipulate media in networked environments. For example, one video blogger who had applied for a media job was told she needed to create a video about herself and post it online as part of her job application. I watched the video and admired her poise and confidence as she expressed herself quite well in front of a camera—skills that are not achieved overnight. Knowing how to create such a video or how to present the self when it counts takes time. Video bloggers and others who have long been aware of these trends have been developing skills by practicing in public and gauging different types of audience reaction to their work. Imagine a world in which video statements became as necessary for certain occupations as résumés. In such cases, more empathy and understanding might be extended to those who have spent considerable time developing mediated self-presentation skills.
Having empathy—at least initially—enables scholars to ask important questions that are crucial for the ethnographic enterprise, such as what message or purpose does a particular medium have? Why are certain objects or people chosen for emphasis? What kinds of participatory predicaments do people encounter when trying to learn in public? We may achieve more understanding by approaching everyday media making with sincere inquiry and empathy rather than hostility, elitist dismissal, and unrealistic temporal evaluations of media targeted for specific audiences.
Recognize Nuance
Despite the fact that many types of video are used in different ways across communities and contexts, scholars sometimes ignore vital nuances and backstories that shape creation, reception, and public sharing of videos. Misconceptions may be illustrated by sharing an observational vignette. At a scholarly conference on do-it-yourself digital media, a leading video blogger and public media figure named Ryanne Hodson presented her work to a largely academic audience. Hodson was a professional media maker who had previously worked as a television producer. She and other first-generation video bloggers had learned to use compression techniques to post videos to their own video blogs around the same time that YouTube launched in 2005 and in some cases even before then. To retain control over their work, they espoused the idea of having an independent video blog that was not part of a monetized platform such as YouTube. Hodson and other vloggers posted their videos to video blogging sites, staunchly avoiding YouTube. During Hodson’s presentation, an audience member persistently referred to her videos as “YouTube videos,” even though Hodson had not yet posted on the site. She was trying to achieve levels of quality, audience participation, and connection that she did not perceive to be likely on YouTube.
Metonymic substitutions such as these in which any online video is classified as a YouTube video is perhaps a testament to the site’s successful branding and widespread uptake, but they are misleading categorizations in certain contexts. Not all public videos are YouTube videos, as there are many other sites and situations in which video is posted online. In fact, not even all YouTube videos are “YouTube videos” in the popular sense of exhibiting wacky virality and assumed rabid desires to commercialize and achieve stardom. YouTube’s huge and ever-changing catalogue includes many types of videos, including professional, pre-professional, advanced amateur, everyday, and educational videos that garner millions of views. Many contexts exist to post online video, and they may have technical platforms, audiences, and intentions that differ quite distinctly from those that are stereotypically associated with YouTube.
From a knowledge acquisition perspective, it is important to recognize that nuances exist in terms of how a video is embedded within a site and how audiences interact with it in ways that arguably create new artifacts as the video lives on. A video that has no commentary may be received differently than a video with many enthusiastic comments and views. Or commentary may be blocked or ignored. Whether such differences actually influence viewers is an empirical question, but it is important to recognize how a video’s situatedness may impact audiences. Admittedly, it is not always possible to have access to all nuances, but it is important to be attuned to their possible existence and effects.
Anthropology is distinguished by its comparative approach. Whether in traditional environments or new digital configurations, comparing and contrasting social arrangements yields analytical insights. Categories may come to light in ways that may be elided when one focuses on one group or website as a “field site.” For example, in conducting research on video practices, I have elsewhere described comparisons between YouTubers who embraced the site and first-generation video bloggers such as Ryanne Hodson who vlogged before YouTube and who initially eschewed that site as a viable platform for distributing their work.37 The comparison highlights salient analytical categories and practices, such as behind-the-scenes technical manipulations and self-idealizations. Analyses of video-sharing practices should consider the nuances of specific sites, including their cultural, social, technical, and commercial features, when understanding how videos are created for particular milieus. Whether different platforms actually produce alternative kinds of video experiences is a question best approached through systematic research. It is also possible that groups who avoid sites because of certain presumed features or philosophies may actually share more than they realize with the characteristics of the creators and sites they eschew. Many of the vloggers whom I encountered shared YouTubers’ vision of democratic and social video sharing.
Anthropologists study artifacts, but nuanced media environments require theoretical reconsideration of what constitutes an “artifact.” Is it a video alone, or the video plus accompanying text description and comments? Not all video-related information may be salient to every research project. Yet key descriptive commentary posted to a video is not always considered in scholarly analyses when it might be logical to do so. For example, one fellow scholar discussed an interview from one of my research videos as if the video had been created and posted by the YouTube interviewee. I explained in the text posted to my video that the comments were part of an ethnographic interview. Yet it was analyzed as if it were found footage created by the interviewee. A video created by a YouTuber versus one created within the context of an ethnographic interview are different genres of “data.” How and when should scholars take into account the material surrounding and contextualizing the videos? What constitutes boundaries of so-called artifacts deserves theoretical consideration. Attending to nuances when analyzing new media environments not only invites sharper analyses of particular research questions but also prompts interdisciplinary teams to collectively question what is meant by the very foundational terms that undergird particular intellectual terrains.
Confront Diversionary Discourses
A discourse that ostensibly expresses concerns about media usage becomes diversionary when it fails to recognize more troubling underlying problems. In other words, diversionary discourses blame the wrong things for societal ills. Diversionary discourses tend to draw on stereotypical arguments in ways that intentionally or inadvertently divert attention from societal issues that are very difficult to identify and address. At root, not all discourses that become diversionary lack merit. For example, I agree that those who use media to fuel egotistical excess need to be helped. At the same time, labeling all genres of media that invite self-participation as “narcissistic” is to misunderstand how media are often used in social ways. Focusing only on obnoxious videos presents a skewed picture of how media are used in ordinary daily life. The YouTube case provided numerous examples of how videos were used to urge people to join a community. In this vein, Miller’s team eloquently argues that “generalisations about new visual forms such as the selfie are often inaccurate. There are many varieties of the selfie which are often used to express group sentiment rather than individual narcissism.”38
Diversionary discourses tend to cyclically reappear. For example, discourses about narcissism surfaced when the medium of video arrived, reemerged when video blogging entered the scene, and raised similar alarms when selfies appeared. Narcissism discourses arguably undergird a single concern, à la Sontag but perhaps as far back as Plato, which is general unease at expressing the self through media at all. Such discourses raise doubt about who has the right to use media. In examining the scholarly record, we find that diversionary discourses that criticize mediated interaction reflect underlying societal prejudices—such as those based on sex, gender, or technical ability. In one example, narcissism claims may be used in sexist ways to foreclose female expression. Exhibiting a circular quality, the argument is that women take selfies because they are said to be vain and narcissistic; thus selfies exude narcissism because women take them.39
Ability is a characteristic used to bolster diversionary narcissism discourses. Nonprofessionals are assumed to be terrible video makers. Vlogs are made by nonprofessionals, and therefore nonprofessionals are narcissists who draw inordinate attention to their undeserving vlogs. Amateur videos challenge professional media making and thus become targets of narcissistic discourses. Everyday videos threaten viewership of professional media because viewers are actually far more tolerant of the vernacular than is typically acknowledged. It is important to distinguish between true narcissism problems and the deployment of a diversionary discourse that demands unpacking the underlying societal prejudice that fuels it.
In addition to narcissism accusations, another diversionary discourse is the idea that mediated interaction is generally a degraded form of human connection. Yet this discourse may divert attention away from more pressing societal inequities about access. For example, Miller and his colleagues argue that “denigration of social media as inauthentic may in part be the practice of elites. Such groups, secure in their power to construct themselves offline, may seek to dismiss the attempts by less powerful populations to assert the authenticity of their self-crafting online.”40 Their conclusions in this context are in part based on the experiences of low-paid migrant workers in China who connect with other people and craft a digital identity portrayal that feels far closer to their beliefs and desires than what they can accomplish amid the socially limited and grim conditions in which they live. Despite decades of scholarship to the contrary, this folk myth about online inauthenticity persists but for different reasons across contexts. Miller’s team, whose project was global in scope, keenly observed, “Whatever misgivings we may feel as academics about this dualistic terminology, it remains a primary mode by which people around the world understand and experience digital media.”41
Another diversionary discourse revolves around blaming networked discourse problems on anonymity. This discourse often completely disregards the fact that many anonymous postings are often helpful and interesting. We would not want to prevent anonymous postings that are meaningful and that build a case for civic engagement among unknown members of coalitions. The real problem is not anonymity—or rather pseudonymity, as networked participants often exhibit recognizable behavior patterns42—but rather the fact that people hold and express underlying biased attitudes. As communication and digital technologies scholar Whitney Phillips argued in her book on subcultural trolling, the problem is not anonymity but the fact that people still hold racist, sexist, homophobic, weightist, ageist, and other biases that appear in digital environments.43
Anxiety over accountability for unacceptable behavior is understandable, but people who are anonymous to each other (or rather pseudonymous) may not be so to site administrators. At best, such discourses about the negative side of anonymity are well meaning because they attempt to identify interactional problems; at worst, these discourses become diversionary by actively discouraging vernacular voices in finding a public audience and for ignoring the fact that people need help with developing participatory literacies. They divert attention away from tackling more urgent but deeply entrenched infrastructural issues, such as societal prejudices and the reasons they are expressed at all.
Overgeneralizations about the ills of mediated behavior will quite likely persist. To some extent they may decrease as new generations experience media in more inter-threaded, less dualistic ways. Yet even when problems expressed in diversionary discourses are “resolved,” new diversionary discourses will no doubt emerge. Researchers must work to unpack them and explain how they divert attention away from more fundamental issues that should be tackled if we are to create more equitable mediated environments.
Analyze Emplacement
Emplacement here refers to how interactions become tangibly or conceptually associated with a physical space. Meet-up experiences show how interactions continually weave back and forth through offline and digital milieus, as they have for decades. For these video makers, their interpretation of “YouTube” became dynamically emplaced in specific locations. The experiences were recorded and shared on YouTube, where place helped create shared histories that further cemented a social concept of YouTube. YouTube interaction was not emplaced or “fixed” in a few locations but rather dynamically emplaced as interaction fluidly moved across different media and in person. In these meet-up videos, places became “stars” in their own right. It is important to study how emplacements influence the creation and maintenance of social groups. Do they exhibit chronotopic orientations, as revealed in this case study? Or do they use other time-space metaphors to galvanize sociality? If they use different tactics, what are they and what are their consequences? Media scholarship should focus more intently on the role of place in digital interaction and the way it shapes and changes what is fundamentally meant by “the internet.”
It is time to cease using binaries and focus more specifically on degrees and types of mediation that occur in particular encounters rather than refer only to the online and offline. To understand nuances of mediated participation, the book introduced the notion of different participatory levels of fungibility across different modalities, which weave across various forms of media. For example, in some cases YouTubers felt emotional fungibility between different degrees and types of mediated experiences. They felt strong emotional connections to people, whether they were discussing something through videos or at a meet-up. Yet at other times they did not encounter equivalences between experiences. It was difficult and expensive, for instance, to physically meet up, compared with conversing with someone via their computer. Attending gatherings required sacrifices of time and money. Combining notions of multiple modalities with participatory fungibility helps scholars to acknowledge and recognize salient differences without resorting to crude binary formulations.
Across media modalities, trade-offs are often deployed to accomplish social goals.44 “The internet” is not a singular, monolithic entity; it is experienced quite differently all over the world and across different social groups.45 Similarly, YouTube is not a singular entity; it is experienced in diverse ways. A productive next step is to understand how networked groups become dynamically emplaced and how place influences what constitutes individuals’ perceptions of a digital milieu over time.
Respect Temporal Trajectories
In his work on rhythm analysis, Lefebvre argued that “the media day never ends, it has neither a beginning or end.”46 This study suggests that, on the contrary, particular media exhibit temporal trajectories that should be recognized and analyzed in order to understand interactive mediation. YouTubers know that videos have rhythms of viewership and commentary. After a certain window (usually a few days) interactivity dramatically dwindles—although engagement may asymptotically never completely disappear. On the other hand, bolstering Lefebvre’s argument is the fact that months or even years later views and comments may surface. Dissipation of viewership does not always index a video’s importance for an individual video maker or for friends in a video-sharing culture.
YouTubers attended to temporalities, thus exhibiting sensitivity to viewers. For example, one socially motivated YouTuber told me that he avoided posting too much within a short period of time so that his viewers’ in-boxes were not flooded with his videos. Media are situated within an interactive chain in which expectations about their appearance and use are rooted in temporal assumptions and norms. Conflict ensues when expectations are either violated or people simply have different ideas about what constitutes appropriate media temporality.
Polyrhythmias or multiple temporalities could function in productive or pathological ways. Arrhythmias in media interaction occurred when people exhibited asymmetrically discomforting temporal expectations, thus producing social tension. For example, video makers sometimes deleted a video that bored them or exhibited unfortunate technical flaws that became more apparent as the vlogger became more experienced. When a video was deleted, so too were all the comments that were posted to it. Members of a vlogging community who had taken the time to watch the video and comment, perhaps providing emotional or technical support and advice, now saw all of their comments—which constituted time and effort—deleted as well. Creators and viewers might have different temporal expectations about how long media should remain on the site, thus creating participatory arrhythmias. Activities such as posting comments have been characterized as interactive “labor” in sites of creative production.47 Interactive labor might be perceived as disrespected because of the (often legitimate) reasons that prompted a video maker to delete a video.
The point here is not to adjudicate who is right and who is wrong about ownership and dispensation of a video’s existence, although videos arguably morph into a different kind of collective artifact when others view and take the time to comment on them. Rather, the goal is to discuss the fact that tensions ensue when video temporicities, or temporal meanings and interpretations about time, conflict. People may become sensitive to the shared histories that certain videos demarcate within a social collective and feel distraught when these videos are terminated through removals. Conversely, new generations of YouTubers may be unaware of these histories of features and choices and may establish new temporal engagements and expectations with collective media.
Ideally, both temporalities and temporicities should be analyzed in terms of how they influence co-creation of mediated social spaces. Temporalities refer to different cultural ways of experiencing time. Temporicities, following similar underlying principles for what scholars call historicities, refer to how different temporally driven participatory organizations become visible or are commercially or politically elided in particular interactive contexts.48 Studying temporicities reveals how canonical forms of mediated, temporally based interaction receive widespread acceptance. Much about how YouTube “works” is hidden from ordinary use. For instance, YouTube reportedly did not always disclose changes to the site in timely ways. Temporicities, or interpretive, historicized, and evaluative aspects of temporal experience, provide important clues to video-sharing cultures. Temporicities should be studied, particularly when tacit temporal, participatory drivers and their effects are ignored or omitted in public and corporate discourses. What does it mean, for instance, when a high threshold of viewer “watch time” becomes a metric for monetization? What are the effects of this requirement on creators and viewers, both in terms of physical impact as well as creativity?
Of particular importance also is studying arrhythmias between humans, media, and posthuman collective forces. Tensions emerge when media trajectories and the life trajectories of those who made the media are no longer in sync. When people pass away, they often have strong feelings about the dispensation of their mediated legacy, and these media dispositions may conflict with those of loved ones. Ideological conflicts may result from tensions about how long media should remain and how they should be curated. Should all videos, including “frivolous” videos, remain or only the ones that portray video makers according to their preferred legacy? These temporal anxieties are likely to multiply exponentially as the rate of video production increases.
Studying temporalities exhibits challenges. As videos multiply and sites change, it will become increasingly difficult, if not impossible, to understand the specific technical and commercial contexts that video makers were operating within when they created and posted a video. When such changes occur, a platform conceptually becomes a different “site,” with different features, options, and constraints at various points in time. As a thought experiment, imagine trying to understand the temporal contextualizations of YouTube partnerships. Consider a video that rants about YouTube’s partnership program at the beginning of the program’s launch in 2007 versus one in 2012, when the program was opened up and an entirely different model of monetization was in operation, including an ability to monetize single videos. In contrast, imagine a rant on monetization posted in 2017 or 2018 when YouTube further restricted the program to high performers.49 These rants are temporally contextualized at points in which partnership had particular parameters, such as whether creators needed to obtain specific levels of overall viewership to apply.
Temporally contextualizing videos becomes complicated over time as they travel across platforms and are acontextually viewed. Consider the case in which a scholar encounters a rant about “partnership” years after it was posted. Imagine further that it was originally created in 2007 but reposted in 2012. Reposting videos due to glitches or the need to refresh one’s channel are common facets of YouTube life. In some cases YouTubers are aware of the importance of these temporicities and carefully mark reposted videos with an original upload time stamp—say, in the text description to a video. Other YouTubers are less attentive to such temporicities and do not provide clues about their original temporal context of posting. In the example above, how will a scholar determine which parameters of “partnership” the video maker is complaining about if this information is not clarified in the video? Such contextualizations may require historical investigation that may not be easily tracked by participants or researchers.
Understanding how features change over time and across media generations will be difficult, given the pace of change and the fact that such alterations are not always made explicit to users. Newcomers will not necessarily perceive how new features provide different organizational frameworks for interaction. For example, in 2012 one pundit lamented YouTube’s elimination of the temporal organization of video recommendations. In the past it was possible to see video categories, such as most viewed “today,” “last week,” “in the last year,” and “all time.”50 Yet the pundit wondered if YouTube’s elimination of temporal organization was an attempt to “erase history”—a fascinating observation of contested temporicities worth investigating.
New media generations on YouTube sometimes experience the site in profoundly different ways. Certain modifications will be visible and salient, while others will remain subtle or change too frequently to track. Viewers who used the temporal recommendation feature were part of a media generation that had conceptually oriented around time in order to view videos and share cultural experiences of temporally situated videos with other YouTubers. New media generations might not be aware that this type of organization is a possibility. The emergence and gestation for a particular media generation can be quite rapid. Indeed the word “generation” connotes human-life longevity, but media generations may involve very rapid cycles, lasting a few years, months, or even smaller increments of time, depending on the phenomena under study.
Rapid experiential temporicities have methodological implications. Anthropologists have traditionally based ethnographic research on the year-long cycle, in part because of a historical legacy of following communities across one full agricultural cycle of activity. Anthropologist Michael Scroggins references the term “ecological annum” to describe a temporicity that emerged from specific historical eras that privileged anthropological study of agriculturally framed or hunter-gatherer societies.51 Scroggins advises researchers not to unreflectively rely on the “ecological annum” but rather to attend to the specific rhythms of an activity under study. Rather than conduct research privileging a historical temporal framework, he recommends “follow[ing] concrete action from start to finish and back.” When studying laundry, he notes, one follows the process of how a shirt becomes “clean,” which implies, of course, another cycle of how a shirt becomes “dirty.”
Understanding temporalities has been central to this YouTube study, which demonstrated that media cycles may or may not map to traditional anthropological—or even human—rhythms. Indeed, media cycles may not be as predictable as is an “ecological annum” based on a local agricultural cycle. It is important to be attuned to multiple rhythms of phenomena and observe how new media “generations” respond to them.
At the same time, the long-term orientation of anthropologically motivated ethnography retains analytical force as a way of maintaining deep engagements that yield key insight into varied lifeways. It is instructive to watch action over the course of time, perhaps several years if possible, as insight is revealed when researchers track how interaction unfolds over time. A year of engagement may still provide a crucial long-range and temporally meaningful perspective that may not be visible through short-term visits to a site. The point is to attend to unexpected but salient temporalities. Whatever temporal cycles occur, scholars should analyze how media may operate according to multiple and unpredictable participatory rhythms. Researchers should study the moments when creators’ and viewers’ temporal expectations or mediated rhythms may dovetail or fall out of sync.
Reconsider the Ethnographer’s Role
Renowned visual anthropologist Jay Ruby once asked whether researchers would be needed to document and tell the stories of future generations once it became commonplace to record one’s own lifeways and messages.52 He posited that visual production skills (and, I would add, digital literacies) would become more widespread among populations who would normally garner interest as subjects of research. In that event, people would have the tools to make their own media. Once people learned the appropriate technical, aesthetic, and rhetorical skills to mediate their message, he wondered, “Why would they need the outsider? Why wouldn’t they want to make their own films?”53 YouTube provides an open experiment that addresses Ruby’s question. Are visual ethnographers needed now that video makers can make and circulate their own statements? Clearly, as “expert witnesses,”54 YouTubers offer unique insights about the site and their participation. Indeed, YouTube contributes to anthropological analyses because it provides images in living color of certain public aspects of the intimate lives, interactions, and lifeways that researchers wish to understand. To suggest that scholars and media specialists are the only ones capable of recording and transmitting diverse cultural messages is arguably a form of elitism.
Nevertheless, visual ethnographers play a vital role in today’s media-saturated world. Although video sites enable global distribution of people’s own stories, individual videos are not guaranteed widespread viewership, nor will they necessarily receive in-depth consideration when they are viewed. Visual ethnographers must continue traditional activities, including creating, curating, contextualizing, and translating videos that deserve broader audiences because of the importance of their message and their illumination of diverse lifeways.
Curating videos with important messages functions as a form of civic engagement or what anthropologist Sarah Pink and others characterize as activism.55 Calling attention to specific works and boosting their visibility may assist in transmitting messages, especially for those who are developing digital skills or hesitate to engage in self-promotion for fear of being labeled as narcissistic. Curation is a form of civic engagement because it involves selecting certain videos over others to receive attention and raise awareness about important issues and experiences. Despite the popular rhetoric about the assumed ability to craft one’s best self online, people who post images or personal information do not always have complete “control” over their representation and reception. What people hope to show and what others interpret are not always aligned, as early bloggers learned when their character had been misconstrued. Young bloggers found that disclosing specific details leads to “frustration that audience members would essentialize their entire characters as being one way, simply because they chose to relay these aspects of themselves online.”56 Anthropologists and other media scholars can help contextualize and interpret the meaning and role of vernacular works in cultural contexts. Important everyday videos thus require more rather than less attention.
Anthropologists and ethnographers can provide commentary and other materials that translate ideas for the general public and provide contextualization about videos’ merits. Translation has long been an important function of visual anthropologists. As anthropologists Howard Morphy and Marcus Banks have argued, even within the same cultural groups images may be interpreted in radically different ways.57 Understanding which works have merit is a form of spectatorial literacy, and visual anthropologists can help educate publics about the importance of particular vernacular works, in part through ethnographically sensitive studies that contextualize videos within a group’s lifeways.
Spectatorial literacies are often discussed in light of deciphering meaning, truth, and biases in visual and digital works. Yet fundamental elements of spectatorial literacies also include developing openness and tolerance to media when a message is worthy but production skills are not polished or professional. As digital divides are likely to persist, not only in terms of access to devices but to development of digital production skills, it will be advantageous to remain spectatorially open to different kinds of messages and ways of telling stories. People are increasingly shooting video on phones and handheld devices, and production quality may not resonate with all audiences, but it is important to understand and decipher when a message may be socially or politically significant.
Since Ruby asked about the necessity of visual documentarians in the early 1990s, countless films and videos have been made by professional anthropologists, ethnographers, and documentarians that reveal their continued importance in using visual means to understand lifeways. At the same time, everyday videography has risen dramatically, which presents challenges for older models of researcher-subject relations that assumed that the anthropologist always maintains control over mediating an interaction within a research context. The case of YouTube shows how the proliferation of cameras in everyday life means that subjects will be both collaborating and at times competing for how an interaction will be publicly represented. As indicated in figure 8.1, as I was recording the action at a meet-up in Toronto, a woman saw me and trained her camera on me. Initially, we sat staring at each other for several humorously awkward moments. She eventually explained that her goal was to video record everyone she could find who was also recording the event. Clearly the visual anthropologist is not the sole mediator and interpreter of events.
Video-blogging norms included people operating their own cameras as they participated at meet-ups. It was common to see people video-record each other within the video-blogging idiom. Human-subject protocols often have language about how recordings will be controlled and protected by researchers. But how does one guarantee control within video-blogging milieus? In one instance, a man whom I interviewed during a meet-up trained his camera on me. I could have requested that he stop recording, but that would have been odd and socially out of step in a video-blogging milieu in which it was accepted for everyone to record their own social encounters. It would also have been physically impossible to enforce. Even if I made that request and interviewees respected it, I could not control the cameras of all the passersby who recorded my interactions. Indeed, a few meet-up videos on YouTube showed me interacting with and interviewing YouTube participants. In camera-heavy environments the researcher easily becomes a mediated subject.
Of course, one could conduct interviews solely in quiet, empty rooms. This would offer certain control in terms of access to responses. But such activity would count as formal interviews rather than qualify as participant-observation. Within the core idiom of video blogging, conversations occurred and were mutually recorded more informally during public socialization. Additionally, interviewing people at gatherings facilitates dialogue and comments about meet-up events in progress. I conducted research in public at video-themed events amid many camera-wielding video makers with their own ethics and agendas, each of which may or may not dovetail with my views on what is appropriate to record and distribute. For instance, at one meet-up I respected a lurker’s request not to be recorded; YouTubers did not. The question becomes, how well do ethical recording principles generalize beyond controlled and overtly collaborative ethnographic projects?
Newer models of ethnographic interviewing forgo traditional sedentary approaches in ways that resemble interactive, mobile, and public characteristics of the video-blogging idiom. Of particular interest is the idea of the “walking interview” in which ethnographers studying place and other concepts may move around and walk with research participants during a recorded interview.58 Active engagements may insightfully reveal interviewees’ interpretations of place, rendering the traditional sedentary interview less useful in contemporary ethnographic contexts. Walking interviews of this type invite mobile—and often very public—recordings.
Much discussion has occurred about the ethics of using visual materials in digital anthropology. After one of his videos went viral and was reposted on over 1,000 blogs and websites, anthropologist Michael Wesch noted, “It is not hard to imagine the kinds of comments and graphics that might be added to ethnographic film that could not only degrade the quality of the work, but also violate the dignity of those portrayed in the video.”59 In my case I did not need to imagine it. Wesch’s fears were realized in my study when a parody video appeared in which an interviewee’s voice in one of my videos was altered to bark like a dog. Whole volumes have been rightly devoted to ethics in image making. For example, writing from an interdisciplinary perspective that draws on communication scholarship, film studies, and anthropology, Larry Gross, John Stuart Katz, and Jay Ruby discuss a range of concerns with respect to the rights of subjects, including how they are represented and whether informed consent is realistically achieved, especially amid video-surveilled societies.60 Recent discussions about visual ethics continue at the American Anthropological Association meetings in which visual anthropologists explore the rights of subjects and the impact of images. Of particular concern is how forms of representation “are often used and understood in unanticipated ways outside and sometimes within their original anthropological frameworks of creation.”61
Emphasis in these discussions has rightly focused on the subjects of research, and those dilemmas continue. However, we are now living in an era in which cameras are prevalent and we are all being recorded by parties with varying agendas. Some people believe that living among such widespread surveillance may be advantageous because recordings may be used to protect people from crimes (such as in banks) and expose potential abuses of those in power (such as police brutality). Augmented reality researcher Steve Mann has coined the term “sousveillance” to describe how people who are not in power turn the camera on those who do have control to monitor their behavior.62 Turning the camera back on powerful people is not surveillance, as in viewing something from above, but rather monitoring someone from “below,” as the French word sous denotes. In an era in which cameras are prevalent in everyday life, anthropologists may find themselves under “sousveillance” when they study other people.
Sousveillance is said to counterbalance the power one individual may have over another, such as the power that a visual ethnographer may have in recording and shaping the story of other people. Writing from the perspective of video ethnography, Wesley Shrum and his colleagues define the “videoactive context” as the field in which social situations are influenced by the presence of a camera. They argue that it is important for the filmmaker to allow themselves to be recorded in order to conduct mutually respectful, collaborative research projects, especially those in which subjects have a stake in coproducing the research. In this context Shrum and his colleagues argue that “you must be willing to turn the camera on yourself—to let them film you, to signal your role as participant as well as observer. Finally, though it occurs less frequently, you must be willing to let the subjects fix the camera on you, allowing the subjects to play the role of filmmaker.”63
Video bloggers and the ethical and methodological issues they raise are harbingers for visual ethnographers more generally; people increasingly consider it a normal part of life to record their encounters. Discussions need to consider the ethics of recording a researcher as well as interviewees. These discussions invite a host of important and complex questions about what it means to conduct visual projects in heavily mediated environments. What happens, for example, if casual footage taken from someone observing an ethnographic encounter is released into the wild? In these instances a visual ethnographer would normally omit sensitive or inappropriate footage in public videos. But if someone else takes the footage, a researcher would not be able to protect people in her study from those representations. However, a researcher cannot avoid all public research. As mentioned above, active, walking forms of visual ethnography may necessitate public interviewing to achieve insight—especially in place-based research contexts. What ramifications might this have for interviewees and the researcher? Who will protect the visual ethnographer from the release of footage that would, historically, never have seen the light of day?
In their original volume Image Ethics (1988), Gross, Katz, and Ruby concluded that the preponderance of images will complicate individual rights. Their subsequent volume, Image Ethics in the Digital Age (2003), is similarly pessimistic about subjects’ image rights. However, the authors leave the matter open, stating that “it remains to be seen whether living in the digital age has improved our odds.”64 On the one hand, more individuals may see violative alters of their personae distributed beyond their control and may experience the kind of image-driven, posthuman tremendum discussed in chapter 6. On the other hand, as I have argued elsewhere, we may see a vast proliferation of images such that, aside from the deeply problematic or criminal, many people will have “awkward” images of themselves being circulated, which means that any individual image will lose rhetorical force.65 If everyone has uncomplimentary images of themselves somewhere online, it will be hard for single individuals to use another person’s image to damage that person’s reputation (without risking retaliation). Conversely, a new type of digital divide has appeared based on whether people have an ability to erase problematic visual histories.
A key question is, to what extent does proliferation of mutual filming impact the filmmaker, the research subject, and other people in a visual field given today’s ease of distribution? In this context I am reminded of an image in anthropologist Lucien Taylor’s classic piece on “Iconophobia,” which details scholarly anxieties about the status and truth value of imagery in visual anthropology.66 Taylor discusses how certain film critics and scholars have debated the veracity and ability of images to speak for themselves in terms of representing reality. The article includes several images from visual anthropologists, including a photograph of a woman pointing a camera back at the viewer. The image is labeled “Filming the filmmakers: Longole, from A Wife among Wives (1982), pictured shooting David and Judith MacDougall.” This image is included in the article without further description or contextualization, which raises a number of questions. For example, what is this image’s main message? Is it meant to be an eerie preternatural prediction of the way that cameras have now become prevalent in everyday video contexts? Is it meant to suggest that filmmakers even in past eras had less control than one imagined? Or is it meant to quaintly and playfully depict an indigenous person experimenting with media in a way that ultimately ratifies the control that the professional ethnographic filmmakers David and Judith MacDougall likely had? What was the dispensation of Longole’s raw footage in terms of its ultimate destination beyond its use in visual anthropology studies?
Writing from the perspective of information science, Helen Nissenbaum proposed the concept of “contextual integrity,” which deals with expectations about what is meant to be shared and what is assumed to be private in interactive situations.67 For instance, friends who share confidential information are assumed to keep such information private (although, of course people may breach that trust and gossip). Amid this framework the context of a YouTube gathering certainly does not invite expectations for privacy given that cameras are everywhere. Nevertheless, it may not be appropriate to circulate everything one sees and records. Communication and digital media scholar Graham Meikle calls for an “ethics of visibility” in which people should more carefully consider “who and what is valid for exposure,” even when behavior occurs in public.68
Anthropologists become members of a community for a time. In mediated communities they may feel a responsibility to share and exchange footage for certain projects. Sharing footage is one way in which reciprocity can occur. Reciprocity is often seen as promoting more warm, mutual feelings of community. But what happens when community members request footage that an anthropologist may be reluctant to share for a variety of reasons, including protecting subjects, guarding against misinterpretation of video data, and degrading personal opportunities for professionalization of the footage? Relationships may sometimes be best preserved by not exchanging footage. Alternatively, sharing and discussing certain images may show the researcher’s willingness to help people develop digital literacies and skills that facilitate transmission of people’s own messages and stories.
As Ruby pointed out years ago, true collaboration (versus simply participating in and thus cooperating with a researcher in a media project) requires having access to and control of the technical and communicative aspects of the project. In truly collaborative efforts, each party “mutually determine[s] the content and shape” of media.69 Additional challenges regarding collaboration include not only making media and assessing who has access to footage, but determining distribution and presentation of ethnographic material. Increasingly, people are sharing their stories on social media sites. Researchers must decide if such sites represent the appropriate venue for sharing anthropological knowledge.
A significant challenge involves expectations about social media sharing. On social media sites users are encouraged to share information about themselves. Wrestling with disclosing personal aspects of making media has been a part of anthropology since at least the discipline’s reflexive movement. Yet how much should scholars share of themselves to resonate with people who are learning about anthropological concepts through media? Participation in digital environments is becoming increasingly important for young people to share information and circulate civic messages.70
To answer Ruby’s question, visual anthropologists productively discover important patterns of mediation and provide perspective not apparent in videos alone. Researchers make important contributions through anthropological analysis, creation of visual and textual ethnographies, and ethnographic contextualization of important vernacular works. Visual ethnography brings together both researchers’ and video makers’ voices to identify important general patterns about networked interaction. In addition, visual ethnographers create texts and visual works that communicate these analyses to diverse audiences. The role of the visual ethnographer continues amid—and in response to—the proliferation of everyday media. Visual ethnographers may also increase the visibility of videos that are not given sufficient attention in popular and scholarly discourses but that illustrate important cultural insights. The YouTube case demonstrates that the role of the visual ethnographer retains fundamental analytical vitality amid the explosion in vernacular video.
Going Forth in Style
Drawing on research in linguistic anthropology, future studies might apply the concept of “style” to the study of new media sites. Insights about the human condition often come from linguistics and linguistic anthropology, fields that have widely influenced studies in cultural anthropology. In linguistics style is defined as “a social semiosis of distinctiveness.” Style is a symbolic system that is recognizably different from other ways of engaging in activities, including things such as speaking, using text, or sharing videos.71 The idea of speaking style appears as recognizably distinctive only when compared with other possible ways of speaking and their related social meanings. All styles are ideologically motivated in that they identify acceptable behaviors in particular social groups or institutions.72 Styles are connected to particular aesthetics, which are organized around notions of relevant forms of value. Style may operate within a particular culture or internationally and cross-culturally, as members of a playful “YouTubia” envisioned.
Political scientist and historian Benedict Anderson once wrote, “Communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined.”73 His claim is interesting because it applies not only to the social arrangements that materialize from mediated interaction but also to technical platforms from which such communities emerge. Examining features and parameters of interaction across various sites in terms of style will quite likely shed analytical light on how websites and new media platforms facilitate or complicate imagined communities.
Focusing on style not only illuminates mediation’s role in interaction; it also addresses critiques of the imagined community concept. For example, critics argue that the imagined community rubric suggests complete homogeneity and principally relies on mental ideations of collectivity generated through media. Yet these factors do not account for intensive loyalties that imagined communities supposedly yield. Studying the style in which communities are imagined provides opportunities to address tensions as imagined communities are formed and contested. Exploring the concept of style may show how different groups bond across multiple modalities and even cultures, as the YouTube experience suggests.
As we move forward, key questions include, what are the distinctive properties that sites exhibit to facilitate interaction? What are the ideological motivations behind particular forms of distinctiveness and aesthetics? By thinking about style, one is forced to comparatively consider how different sites or the same site exhibits change in interaction over time. For example, Anderson’s concept has been criticized for its emphasis on ideation, whereas “shared happenings” are seen as crucial for community formation. Are physical meet-ups important “shared happenings” for all mediated groups who seek community? What other methods might they use? When people gather in person, what mediated modalities do they prefer? Is wielding the camera important at all times? What about the style of a site’s features and functionality? Do commercial features such as “subscription” models impair or facilitate sociality? Do creators engage in workarounds to achieve their ends, or do technical and commercial features produce competitive tensions? It is important to analyze how features are proposed and how they are adapted to serve particular agendas. Also of interest is how or whether video makers engage in or resist particular styles of mediation within and across sites.
Style is a system of distinction. Moving forward, we should consider how style influences video creation and how videos are shared, received, and interpreted. Thanks for Watching represents an alternative narrative of how one socially oriented group used YouTube to interact in ways that respected and encouraged the vernacular. Meaningful socialization and commercialization are not necessarily incompatible in creative social groups, but forethought is required to create user-friendly platforms. Like the fish who must “forget” the sea to adapt to land, media evolution requires us to suspend our acceptance of YouTube’s profitable march toward monetization if we wish to propose user-friendly platforms that support video sociality. No doubt future groups will emerge that accomplish their goals according to their own styles. Systematically studying new media generations and their choices will reveal innovative ways of using video for self-expression and collective interaction—at least for a time.