6
Portals to the Posthuman
At an internet research conference, a speaker asked attendees to reflect on all the ways we generate and create digital data, including online accounts, emails, and social media. Glancing around the room, I saw many stunned expressions—including my own. Suddenly vast seas of digital pieces of our lives danced before our eyes. The question brought to life the realization that we are being digitized in ways far beyond our knowledge or control. People are creating digital footprints in the form of countless representations in photographs, videos, and interactions. Together, these make up one’s digital legacy. These alternative versions of ourselves, or “alters,”1 may live on in a posthuman realm. They may exist indefinitely beyond the human life cycle and invite other people to judge, interact with, and make sense of partial dimensions of our personhood.
The staggering number of our digital details invites us to ask, just how important is our mediated legacy? What are the consequences of leaving representations of ourselves online in perpetuity, even after we leave a site? Who (or what) should control our representations: humans or algorithms? Or, perhaps realistically, some combination? As our digital lives increase exponentially, these questions take on urgency, whether or not we are ready to acknowledge them as important life questions. It may seem as though we are only participating in ephemeral social media in daily life. Yet creating and sharing media influences who we are. We want people to think that we are clever, politically active, funny, or technically competent. Whether a video is an earnest vlog or a hilarious video of a cat dashing around with a tissue box on its head, connotations about a video maker’s legacy become available for others to assume and judge.
This chapter addresses the phase of the Lefebvrian cycle involving decline and the end of a participatory trajectory. Video makers may leave YouTube through digital migration, lack of interest, or passing away. This chapter analyzes the end of participating on YouTube within a social group as its members experienced it amid interactive, commercial, and technological choices and parameters. A central goal of the chapter is to examine the impact of individuals’ digital legacies. The next chapter supplements the Lefebvrian rubric by analyzing the idea of participatory rebirth. It addresses how YouTubers’ concerns about monetization reveal what a renewed video-sharing site might look like.
From its inception, a video is highly influenced by many factors, some of them beyond our influence. Key elements include the viewing desires of our potential audiences, the technical parameters of the platform we post on, and the socio-cultural expectations of online video. Once a video is posted, we no longer have control over its uses and interpretation,2 an observation that Plato similarly made about writing’s independence from its author that may be generalized to different forms of media.3 Practically speaking, we forfeit aspects of individual agency or choice about how our self-expressions and representations will be viewed or consumed in the present and in unimaginably distant futures. Indeed, it is through the process of making and sharing a video that our “selves” are created, questioning the stability of identity.4
Examining ethnographic data from video-sharing cultures prompts the question of how our humanity—the locus of traditional anthropological study—is being influenced by engaging in technical acts such as making videos. Our exogenous, mediated representations may vanish given ever-changing media formats—or they may exist in perpetuity. These combined representations evoke the idea of the “posthuman,” in which a person’s subjectivity may move beyond a particular body in ways that challenge the assumed existence of a stable, singular, autonomous, agentive self.5 The posthuman has many connotations, but it often refers to the idea that human identity is no longer contained in a body but may exist in representational form in ways that influence unknowably large numbers of people. In turn, others shape who we believe we are or wish to become. In one of the posthuman’s myriad conceptualizations, a singular super consciousness emerges. In another version the posthuman constitutes a collective or hive that contains the disparate thoughts of many, such that individual identities become connectively incorporated.6 This chapter focuses on the latter vision, in which we can access a multiplicity of voices on a broad scale through YouTube.
Some scholars reject the posthuman as broad conjecture that disregards the human spirit. Others see it as forthcoming but still far away—the stuff of science fiction. This chapter argues that YouTube is already a site of the posthuman for individuals and at the level of the site itself—provided that the concept is viewed as a feeling tone or rubric for experiencing media rather than as a label for individual bodies or identities.
The chapter begins by situating its argument with regard to prior conceptions about what constitutes the posthuman. It draws on illustrative posthuman characteristics to analyze how configurations of people, algorithms, and media combine to alternatively threaten individual identities and provide a comforting connection to a collectivity from which one is never abandoned. The chapter analyzes how people react when confronted with the identification challenges of the posthuman, particularly when techno-social interactions complicate fantasies of agentive participation and representational control in video cultures. An example includes mean-spirited remix videos in which one’s work is changed in ways that contradict one’s intended message and self-perception. A further example includes how algorithms on YouTube aggressively promote such offensive videos. These characteristics combine to function as violative alters that challenge one’s sense of personhood and cast doubt on the practical viability of achieving comprehensive digital literacies in media-sharing cultures. The posthuman experience on YouTube invites consideration of participation’s connotations and implications, not just on a particular site but across media ecologies.
The chapter then examines how interviewees visualize the trajectory of their digital legacies after they pass away. Their narratives orient to their media’s purpose and projected temporal engagements. While some interviewees envisioned a permanent legacy to provide comfort to mourners, others saw themselves as unimportant in a vast world and believed their media should be rather quickly deleted. Such stories echo the connective aspect of the posthuman as well as feelings of being merely one voice in a much larger social field.
Next, the chapter calls on interviewees’ narratives of departure within media ecologies to propose new analytical concepts for characterizing digital migration patterns. In some cases creators left the site, but they retained its social framework when interacting with YouTubers on other social media, enacting a conceptual migration. Stories of digital migration illustrate how the posthuman collective on YouTube reacts when members disappear without explanation. Those left behind may become distressed if they have supported creators over time.
The ethnographic data provides a foundation for the chapter’s conclusion, which analyzes whether a “post-YouTube” exists. In crucial ways YouTube itself exhibits signs of being a posthuman entity. We tend to think of websites as monolithic, but sites also have alters that are mutable, unpredictable, and expansionist. Alternative versions of a concept of YouTube travel beyond a website in multiple incarnations. In fact, various ideals of what should constitute YouTube travel within and across mediascapes, all with their own technological features and participatory expectations.
The chapter probes the idea of the posthuman to critically examine the ramifications of having uncertain control over one’s mediated legacy. The argument is not that we should surrender control but rather the opposite. If we wish to preserve the human element of the posthuman, we must be vigilant as to how technologized parameters such as algorithms are deployed to shape the content and context of media creation. A posthuman mediascape may not yet be a universal reality, but the YouTube case enables media makers to gaze through its portals to begin parsing its parameters and effects in the present and in perpetuity.
On Posthumanism
YouTube resembles the type of posthuman rubric that facilitates a heterogeneous collective. It contains representations of the thoughts of large swaths of people who can provide content and access seemingly infinite amounts of information and media. Not only can we connect to myriad voices, we can also experience different versions of ourselves over time and across contexts. Alters may refer to visual representations such as videos7 but also to subtle sets of information such as data-driven behavior patterns tracked over time, which may be aggregated into bundles. Alters vary temporally. We may see a video that we made as a child and another that we created as an adult. These videos exist for a time in temporal simultaneity. Time plays a significant role in how we deal with posthuman experiences, thus encouraging a focus on temporality, or different cultural ways of experiencing time.8
The posthuman is a controversial concept. By definition, anthropologists study humankind. As anthropologists who study social media usage, Miller and his colleagues underscore the fact that they are not studying “posthuman” entities but rather human beings who have “attained” more capabilities through technology. They state, “We propose a theory of attainment to oppose the idea that with new digital technologies we have either lost some essential element of being human or become post-human. We have simply attained a new set of capacities that, like the skills involved in driving a car, are quickly accepted as ordinarily human.”9 As an anthropologist, I too study humans, however technologically integrated they may be. Humans have been incorporating exogenous components to advance their capabilities for millennia. I share researchers’ concerns about breathless overgeneralizations about the death of humanity.
The argument here is not that we must study individuals as fully realized posthuman entities. Yet it is difficult to claim that it is only attainment or augmentation of controlled skill sets that emerge when YouTubers interact. For example, people must deal with how others appropriate their videos. They must contend with large-scale algorithmic search filters that ignore unprofitable videos, thus complicating an ability for all types of creators to be heard. To extrapolate from the car-driving analogy, imagine a driver behind the wheel of a dystopic autonomous vehicle with a control system that has been hacked, locking the driver out of the means of preventing a collision. Within a posthuman YouTube paradigm, individuals may not only experience augmentation; in some cases they may lose control entirely over their own image. These challenges have consequences that merit critical investigation.
The concept of the posthuman may also appear troublesome because long before it came into fashion, scholars from numerous disciplines explored similar issues, including questioning the boundary between the self, technology, and others. Scholars have challenged the idea that a person has a stable identity throughout the life course or across contexts. The vast literature on performative identity shows that there is no stable, authentic core self that somehow can be represented in a video. Identities are marshaled for particular contexts, and we hold various degrees of allegiance to specific performances. For the anthropologist, the very idea of culture as a collection of norms, behaviors, and values that exist prior to the existence of human beings creates a kind of collective, distributed consciousness. When one is born into a culture, one does not necessarily feel a sense of open-ended choice about who to be and how to act—at least not initially. Notions of an agentic, individual self also differ cross-culturally. What constitutes a “human” has been changing for millennia, such that anthropology involves studies of human-machine and other combinatory cyborg entities that construct humanity.10
Posthuman, fluid identity positionings that function across uncertain boundaries between a person and other people and material objects have been widely studied in disciplines such as poststructuralism, postmodernism, feminism, queer theory, science and technology studies, cyborg studies, and actor-network theory.11 The idea of a stable and autonomous self is arguably a recent intellectual invention that privileges people who have historically had the “wealth, power, and leisure to conceptualize themselves as autonomous beings exercising their will through individual agency and choice.”12 The liberal, agentive self is something of a fiction. In actuality, we have always been “posthuman,”13 if the term refers not to antihuman or nonhuman beings but rather to humans who must continually work through other-inflected proposals for personhood that emerge from a combination of technologies, cultures, and configurations of human bodies.
Despite these thoughtful critiques, the “posthuman” is a useful construct for studying video-making anthropologically because it reveals how people work through what they believe to be their mediated self, in part by complying with or raging against the posthuman’s blatant challenges to it. Whether posthuman beings exist is not at issue here. What is important is that conceptually the idea of the “posthuman” bundles metaphors about embodiment, heterogeneity, distributed and collective “intelligence,” algorithmic living, egocentric border confusion, and machine-influenced subjectivity, thus facilitating meaningful analysis of representational and mediated experiences.
If identity is a fiction, it has been useful for constructing personal coherence and meaning in one’s life trajectory. If “identity construction makes connections between who we are, how we imagine ourselves, and how we want others to see us,”14 then it is important to understand how individuals react when they are confronted by glimpses into the posthuman that challenge their ideal sense of self as they interact with collective others through technologized media. People may not always recognize their imbrication in a posthuman condition until they are tangibly confronted with it. Yet points of tension emerge when people experience disturbing versions of posthuman circumstances.
Of particular interest is analyzing how posthuman forms take shape in socially inflected, digital idioms. Anthropology is well suited to apply its lessons to media environments to see how notions of what is “human” are constructed.15 The posthuman may unfold differently across social media sites and platforms and across individuals. Various milieus should be explored if we are to envision a history of future possibilities that are accommodating to the human spirit. Indeed, “the best possible time to contest for what the posthuman means is now, before the trains of thought it embodies have been laid down so firmly that it would take dynamite to change them.”16 Among future generations, posthuman inflections of identity will be naturalized as digital life ways, beyond question or critique.
Being human today means making, participating in, being unknowingly recorded on, or being affected by media. When confronted with the posthuman as viewed through mediated portals, individuals may understandably be reluctant to move through that doorway. Yet in moments of “contact and collision” with posthumanity,17 a wide range of fascinating, hopeful, and disturbing interrelations between humans and technology may be startlingly revealed.
Net Reverberations
The posthuman has a “collective, heterogeneous quality” that evokes the idea of “distributed cognition.”18 Information is dispersed not only across individuals but also in the technological parameters and platforms in which one’s imaged and imagined self is located. For instance, when a video is created and posted to YouTube, the video’s ontology or source of life is partly shaped by the platform, which exhibits specific technical, cultural, social, and participatory parameters that lie outside of the video creator’s mind. To take a simple but illustrative example, crafting a video that is under fifteen minutes simply because a video-sharing platform restricts videos to a fifteen-minute limit, or because YouTube viewers will not likely have the patience for long videos, orients individual “self” expression to a peculiar and sometimes unpredictable combination of factors that include human and technological elements.
Human ingenuity is seemingly limitless, and workarounds are routinely created. For example, before 2010, YouTube users who were not partners were not permitted to upload videos that exceeded ten minutes.19 Video makers became partners when they gained sufficient views and agreed to have advertisements placed on their videos. Partners subsequently shared ad revenue with the site. Only popular creators were invited to be partners in 2007. By 2012 it became possible to monetize single videos.20 Partners were allowed to create videos longer than ten minutes.
Video makers worked around the ten-minute limit by breaking up a long video into ten-minute installments. Still, this workaround shapes the video to the technical parameters of its destination rather than individual creative choice. Whether one’s videos were broadcast in full or in awkward ten-minute chunks became a reputational marker in which aspects of technical and participatory identities could be hypothesized by viewers who understood these hierarchical constraints.21 Status could be read temporally. A creator who could broadcast a video in its entirety was most likely a partner and therefore exhibited high commercial status and value to the site. Of course sites change, and so do their parameters. In 2010 the time limit was increased to fifteen minutes for user-compliant accounts.22 Numerous separate yet interconnected or even competing parameters influence how one’s participatory reputation is crafted and interpreted. By posting a video or comment, YouTube participants are partially “writing themselves and others” into the public eye through sets of reputational clues.23
Analyzing the posthuman may require exploring points of contention and ways in which people manage or resist being pressured into this condition. The following discussion will focus on a case study of an individual whom I will refer to using his YouTube channel name of robtran. His experiential window into the posthuman was emotionally disturbing due to a combination of techno-cultural and interactive parameters that complicated his YouTube participation. If one vision of the posthuman represents a “hive” mind, it is especially fitting to focus on a single individual and his confrontation with collective forces that challenged his interpretation of agentive personhood.
Robtran was a white man in his early forties who often vlogged about current events and personal views. He also created parodic videos and posted a tribute video to a famous broadcaster. His videos typically receive hundreds of views each. As of June 2018, he had a few hundred subscribers. He had been participating on YouTube for about a year and a half when I interviewed him in San Francisco in 2008. Expressing an interest in making films, he said that he appreciated the opportunity to practice his filmmaking skills on YouTube.
During his interview robtran spoke about his unsuccessful attempts to engage with what others believed was a YouTube community. He had difficulty negotiating a favorable mediated reputation that accurately reflected his beliefs. Choices made by algorithms and other YouTubers in the collective not only went against the grain but were violative of his self-perception, including the persona he was trying to project on YouTube.
Violative Alters
In order to understand robtran’s experience, it is helpful to invoke one particular vision of the posthuman. N. Katherine Hayles, a scholar in postmodern literary criticism, calls on science fiction novels to viscerally illustrate how posthuman experiences such as those of robtran may unfold.24 In her seminal work on elucidating posthumanism, she invokes Greg Bear’s novel Blood Music (1985) to describe how the body may be radically absorbed via technical mutations into a distributed collective. In the story a researcher swallows intelligent biochips that he invented, believing he can later retrieve them. The biochips evolve out of his control until each achieves human levels of intelligence. These cells take over the inventor’s body, which is reformed into a kind of goo. A consultant named Michael Bernard also becomes infected. Bernard flees to an isolation ward to reduce the risk of spreading the infection.
Notably, the original biochips mutate and form their own collective consciousness and agenda, quite beyond the goals of their original inventor. Eventually Bernard is also taken over by these cells or beings. While he transforms into intelligent goo, he begins to engage in a dialogue with the cells, thus hearing “music” in his own blood. As his body is being engulfed by the exogenous cells, he learns that, to them, he is now a “cluster” of cells that were “chosen to re-integrate with BERNARD.”25 Bernard protests and tells the intelligent cells that he, in fact, is Bernard. The cells ominously answer, “There are many BERNARD.” Each copy of him functions as a new version of a concept called BERNARD. The book eerily and effectively uses the convention of capital letters to indicate not an original entity but a concept or idea of a person that can be copied yet subtly altered across iterations.
In this posthuman vision, an autonomous, singular, agentive self does not function apart from an unknown quantity of alters. In crucial ways the alters echo but never exactly replicate the person that was once called Bernard. In Blood Music the cells believe that this absorption, which creates many BERNARDs, is the price one must pay to achieve integration into an intelligent collective that offers much more than a singular being ever could. It offers substantial “augmentation.” One has access to countless data, and, importantly, one is never alone. Human identity and physical form are less significant than are seamless communion and immortality.
Existing as an alter in a posthuman condition may “augment” or increase capabilities and possibilities for humans in ways that are neither inherently positive nor negative.26 Joining a collective such as YouTube expands the possibilities for gaining information, connection, and self-expression. Writing from the perspective of experimental digital media studies, Beth Coleman also explored augmentation, which connotes incorporating additions to networked subjects that interrelate technology and an imagined sense of self, one that may vary contextually. However, augmentation is only one part of the story. While it may afford possibilities for self-expression for some people, it creates emotional distress for others when they feel unfairly manipulated by their environment or the collective. Indeed, Coleman acknowledges that “augmentation” can be used for manipulation and coercion as well as for individual good.27
Robtran’s experience exhibits a struggle with exogenously created “alters” that combine within a posthuman environment. Numerous ROBTRANs arguably exist on YouTube in the form of remixed parodies of his videos, but many of them conflict with and even violate his preferred sense of performative personhood in deeply disturbing ways. In studying robtran’s narrative, one finds several similarities between his experiences and those of the fictional Bernard/BERNARDs.
Although participating on YouTube started off as fun for him, robtran wound up dealing with an anti-fan base of “haters” who created obscene and unkind remixes of his videos. Robtran explained his participatory trajectory:
It started off as a lot of fun in August and early September of last year, and then starting in mid-, late September for reasons I can’t understand, and I—I’m not going to try, I attracted the attention of a coterie of about twenty or thirty people, based in Scotland and Belgium, who hate me [laughs]. They make obscene video responses. They take my videos off of YouTube and mash them up. For example, I made a video about anti-Semitism, which was of course against it, and they took it, mashed it up so that I was saying, like, “I hate Jews” and titled it “Robtran Hates Jews.” And, see, with YouTube if you type in “robtran” what you see, before you see any of my videos, is one after another of these mash-up hater videos, that these people produced. There’s about thirty of them altogether. They even formed a group called the “blobtrain” that is dedicated to hating me and harassing me.
In robtran’s case, a group of troublesome video makers remixed his videos and distorted his ideas in deeply insulting ways. Notably, not all of robtran’s videos received such treatment. Other YouTubers profiled in this study, such as ItalianStallionette and kenrg, commented on his videos. In one comment ItalianStallionette called robtran a “kind soul,” and in another kenrg thanked him for his tribute video to a famous broadcaster saying, “That was a great tribute and history of a great broadcaster. Thanks.”
Yet the treatment robtran received from the mash-up video creators disturbed him. Terms for people who engage in such irritating behavior have varied across sites and over time. YouTubers referred to such troublemakers as “haters,” or people who post mean-spirited criticisms or pointless insults. In the 1990s people posting aggressively mean comments were called “flamers.” Communication studies scholar and critic Howard Rheingold defined flames as “outbursts of angry personal attacks.”28 According to anthropologist Tom Boellstorff, in the online environment of Second Life and in some gaming cultures, individuals causing distress are referred to as “griefers.”29 Although important and nuanced differences between these groups merit further study, the behavior exhibited against robtran appears to map most closely with YouTubers’ definition of “haters” and what scholars and pundits call “trolls.”30
According to communication and digital technologies scholar Whitney Phillips, not everyone who causes trouble online self-identifies as a troll, and it is not clear whether the people who targeted robtran considered themselves to be so. Even self-identifying trolls display diverse characteristics. While some trolls claim they have ethical limits, others do not. Some trolling is innocuous while others meet a legal standard of harassment. Trolls may engage in one-time incidents or maintain a routine practice of provocation. What seems to be consistent across robtran’s tormenters and the “sub-cultural” or “self-identifying” trolls that Phillips studied is that they seem to be motivated by doing it for the “lulz,” which means laughing at someone and deriving pleasure from their distress.31 Trolls of this type wish to show that public displays of political conviction should be called out and mocked. Phillips keenly observes that this stance is ironic given that they are enacting their own strongly held convictions through trolling. Of interest to trolls is proving that one should not hold or publicly exhibit forms of “ideological rigidity.”32
Under the posthuman rubric, these hater mash-up videos function as “alters” or alternative versions of robtran’s representation. These alters disregard robtran’s values and ideas of social justice. Words were literally put in his mouth. His videos were hacked to contort his criticism of anti-Semitism, making it appear that he himself was anti-Semitic. Robtran’s experiences seriously call into question the notion of achieving advantageous “augmentation” by being able to make videos. These events also challenge certain connotations of “participatory cultures” that emphasize active decision-making about how one’s media will be created and circulated.
These violative alters were not of robtran’s making and cannot be easily removed (if ever) from internet or YouTube collectives. Robtran may certainly produce alternative images and accounts of himself and his ideas, but the violative alters may lurk in ways that not only distort his sentiments and beliefs but create unwelcome mutations that challenge his ability to project a consistent, self-affirming public identity. In a sense, these haters also add to the participatory space of YouTube by introducing interpersonal and processual conflicts.
The mash-ups’ aesthetic features revealed them to be obvious mockery rather than authentic statements of robtran’s beliefs. Hater videos that parodied robtran were typically technologically modest and transmitted a single image (say, that of a Scottish flag) while bagpipe music played and slow-scrolling text accused him of “slandering” the Scottish people and “offending” their honor. Yet I saw robtran issue no such insults in any of his videos. Such simplistic production values and accusations did not impress. It is hardly intelligent to use basic video-making techniques to insult or wildly accuse a video maker in mean-spirited ways. These incidents challenge the posthuman notion of a collective “intelligence,” given that these haters’ goals included cyberbullying and abusing a person’s image and public persona. Violative mock-ups produced a posthuman feeling tone in which alters were created of robtran that he could not control but nevertheless remain part of a widely accessible YouTube collective.
Algorithmic Anxiety
Equally disturbing for robtran was the fact that the site’s search engine parameters increased the visibility of these distorted alters. Analyzing posthuman dynamics on social media sites includes examining the interrelated aspects of technical platforms and participatory practices. Robtran described how the search algorithm promoted these violative alters to the top of search lists for his YouTube channel name. In some cases he claimed that these video alters appeared on search lists before his original work. As long as viewers kept watching them, YouTube’s search engine placed them ever higher on search lists sorted by view counts. Such participatory distortions are likely to mount in the near term, as algorithms are becoming part of everyday life across numerous contexts.33
Searches that I conducted by “upload date” pushed his comparatively older videos further down the list, given that he had not uploaded a video since 2012. Searching by upload date returned more recent video titles such as Down with Robtran and War on Robtran to the top of the list. A search using the “view count” filter returned two videos at the top from robtran, and the rest were from other people. The collective viewing of these videos over time influences how the search engine prioritizes results. As more people watch the trolls’ videos, the more likely they will appear at the top of search lists that sort videos by view counts. A bundle of technical and human-centered practices combined to yield a listing in which robtran’s voice feels drowned out by the ROBTRANs created by haters and trolls.34
Our stories became algorithmically entangled due to the mechanics of recommendation lists, which aim to return material that viewers would likely wish to watch. Since I did watch several robtran hater views to conduct this analysis, the algorithm kept returning similar videos as recommendations for me through my AnthroVlog account. Yet I watched them only because they upset my ethnographic interviewee, not because I had any organic interest in watching unimaginative videos that featured basic text scrolls of silly insults. I resented the algorithm’s skewed profile of my viewing habits, which created an inauthentic alter for me. As far as the algorithm was concerned, AnthroVlog (or ANTHROVLOG, to use posthuman nomenclature) preferred to watch insulting videos (multiple times), which is partly true but mostly not. This algorithmically constructed profile did not conform to my self-perception as a knowledgeable, aesthetically discerning, socially supportive, and technically savvy viewer.
Robtran also expressed disquietude over an obscene video that he said his haters had made and linked to his channel name. In this video (which I could not locate) a man apparently mimed oral sex for several minutes. When a video is proposed for viewing by the Google recommendation system, the video is indexed with a small, representative thumbnail image taken from the video. Robtran’s concern was that this offensive video, which he saw listed next to his video in the recommendation list, would not contain any hints of its offensive content in the thumbnail image or video description. He worried that friends and family looking for his videos might inadvertently click on the obscene one because it referenced him. Robtran explained:
Now because the little thumbnail that comes with [the obscene video] doesn’t really look like that, I can’t allow my grandmother, my niece, my sister, or my mother to look at my YouTube channel, [to] look at my videos because when you run a search of my name or even if I were to send them a direct link to my channel page, if they looked at a video, the first thing they’re going to see on the right panel is that guy going [mimes oral sex motions] like this for three minutes. You can just imagine my grandmother going, “Oh look, somebody likes Robby,” and then clicking on that, but not knowing any better, and having a heart attack!
Robtran faced intense anxiety when his work was linked to a hater video that was obscene and offensive. He feared that people searching for him might find and watch the other video first and be exposed to its repugnant contents, quite against his and presumably many viewers’ wishes. Of course one can immediately stop watching, but the damage may be done. There are some images, however fleeting, that one cannot unsee.
Much public discourse criticizes young people’s ostensibly foolish choices about what they post, suggesting that youth lack proper digital literacies. While developing media skills is undeniably important, it is also clear that even innocent videos may be used in unfortunate ways. Creators do not have control over a site’s algorithms, which may promote disturbing alters of their work. Communication scholar Michael Strangelove makes the point that we live in a historical moment in which so much fakery and simulation abounds that people long to project an aura of authenticity, order, and stability about themselves. He argues that confessional video blogs and autobiography are popular because they offer the allure of projecting an authentic self. He quotes Karen Wright, who, writing in Psychology Today, observed, “Amid a clutter of counterfeits, the core self is struggling to assert itself.”35 Even if identity is ultimately a fiction, many people would nevertheless empathize with robtran’s frustration. In his case the problem is not rampant narcissism through making too many videos. Rather, the predominance of disturbing alters strongly suggests that he should make even more videos that reflect his social sensitivity, in part to drown out the counterfeit versions that have accrued online and that are algorithmically privileged in search engines.36
Robtran told me that he had repeatedly yet unsuccessfully requested that YouTube staff remove these videos. He equated them with harassment, but YouTube apparently did not. In YouTube’s policies users are warned that “not everything that’s mean or insulting is hate speech.” Yet hate speech is not permitted.37 According to YouTube, “Hate speech refers to content that promotes violence or hatred against individuals or groups based on certain attributes, such as: race or ethnic origin, religion, disability, gender, age, veteran status, and sexual orientation/gender identity.” The policies against harassment and cyberbullying state, “We take this issue seriously and will remove comments, videos or posts where the main aim is to maliciously harass or attack another user. However, at YouTube we understand the value of free expression, so please understand that not all negative or mean videos and comments will be removed.”38
YouTube has provided creators with an “augmented” capability to make and share videos.39 But one group’s successful augmentation compromised robtran’s self-expression. Uneven abilities result in asymmetrical augmentation, which occurs when one party or set of individuals is given access to capabilities, yet similar or other capabilities are simultaneously withheld or reduced for other people. The haters’ augmented ability to express their humor was facilitated by the site and its technical features, such as search engines and recommendation algorithms. Conversely, robtran’s self-expression was compromised. Asymmetrical augmentation may considerably detract from a video maker’s enjoyment or even basic ability to engage in media sharing. As long as these videos are watched, the viewing algorithms smugly march on, promoting these videos and associating them with ROBTRAN even as robtran rages against their attempts to mar his preferred projection of public identity.
Manipulating Reputation Systems
YouTubers identified problems with reputation systems, which enable people to evaluate the usefulness of media such as videos and comments. From the first rating onward, voting on video quality creates one reputational index for the creator or the media that is rated or both. When I began studying YouTube, it offered a rating system of 1 (Poor) to 5 (Awesome!) stars that enabled people to record their assessment of videos.40 Yet when most people rated something, they reportedly gave it either one or five stars rather than the intermediate ratings.41 By 2010 and continuing in 2018, the site offers only a “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” rating system for videos and comments. At the time of robtran’s interview, the site still had the five-star system.
YouTubers quickly learned that reputation systems could be used tactically. For example, in ethnographic interviews that I conducted for my book Kids on YouTube (2014), young people said that their rivals on YouTube might rate their videos poorly. In this way, competitors could maintain a relatively higher viewing reputation.42 An occasional one-star rating would not necessarily affect a video that was also rated favorably by many viewers and friends. However, a collective strategy of many people weighing in or using automated bots to rate videos could influence a video’s assessment and, by extension, the reputation of the video maker. Automated methods violate the site’s terms of use, but they routinely occur. When they are detected, view counts may be removed. In a high-profile case, the Universal music label was stripped of nearly 1 billion allegedly fake views.43
Reputational manipulation became more personally challenging for robtran when he made a video for a sick child that was continually one-starred in a harassing way. A video maker whose YouTube channel name was SadieDammit (now known as SimplySadie) posted a video on December 6, 2006, called The Hugs for Jacey Campaign. The video invited viewers to make video responses that sent good wishes or virtual “hugs” to a ten-year old girl named Jacey who was in the hospital battling leukemia and whose mother had posted videos that alerted SadieDammit to her story. Robtran felt moved by this plea and made his own supportive video. He said that it felt “really good” to send good wishes to Jacey and that her mom had commented by thanking him and telling him that Jacey had liked the video. Unfortunately, his haters rated the video poorly until it finally accumulated an average rating of one star (Poor) in the YouTube system. Robtran explained his concern:
The haters started one-starring this video. And they one-starred it down to one star. And I was afraid that people were going to look at that and think, “Oh my God, this has one star and it’s from a Hugs for Jacey Campaign.” You know, that’s what it says, “Re: Hugs for Jacey Campaign.” They’re gonna think “God, what did that asshole say to her? I mean what kind of an ogre is this guy to—” Because people see one star and they assume, it’s got to be awful. So, at the time I had about thirty to forty subscribers. I asked them, please, I told them the whole story in a video, and I said please come and five-star that back up to the level, and then once it’s up to five stars, I’ll turn off the ratings, right? Nobody answered the call. Nobody. Sadie, eventually, well, I subscribe to SadieDammit, and she came, and I asked her, like much later, and she did it of course. But nobody else did. Not a single other person. And I was totally shocked by that. I mean, and I’ve had people say, “Well, you take this stuff too seriously.” It’s like, well yeah, it’s stuff I’ve worked on. And in this particular case it’s something I had a certain emotional investment in, and why can’t you can’t you dig that, dude? Why can’t you understand that?
The episode upset robtran because some people assess videos—and, by association, the abilities and commitment of video makers—by examining rating systems. Although experienced users are suspicious of rating systems for these reasons, robtran was nevertheless concerned about being perceived as a “hater” rather than as someone supporting a person who was suffering. On such a sensitive topic, viewers might see a single-star rating and avoid the video, believing it contained insensitive or hurtful commentary about Jacey, the subject of the video. The episode was doubly traumatic because he reached out for community assistance and asked viewers to rate his video highly as a countermeasure. Yet he received little help in driving the rating back up to levels that would publicly display his sincere support for a community member in need.
The Needs of the Collective
Robtran’s narratives also contained positive glimmers of a posthuman condition that emphasizes personal connection and support. Given his negative experiences, robtran contemplated leaving YouTube altogether. He created an angry farewell video only to be persuaded to remain by viewers whom he characterized as “saner heads” who urged him to stay. These “saner heads” arguably functioned in a posthuman way to draw him back into a collective that felt richer amid broad participation. YouTubers who encouraged him to remain needed him to continue contributing to the site, to make the collective experience more diverse and interesting.
Interconnected yet competing energies produced anxieties for robtran and others who felt that their media making was out of control. Posthuman rubrics often include a vision of an agentive self being absorbed into an intelligent collective that includes many voices. Most synonyms for the word “intelligence,” including judgment, reasoning, understanding, or cleverness, do not apply to the haters’ output that threatened robtran’s sense of mediated self. On the other hand, “saner heads” in the collective encouraged robtran to stay connected.
Perhaps it would be more productive to refer to such posthuman constructs as collective forces in a more Latourian vein.44 When bundled together, collective forces produce significant effects that sometimes augment but at other times challenge an individual’s desire to express the self in technologized realms. Collective forces include humans with intelligence and consciousness as well as technologically driven entities lacking consciousness (so far), such as search algorithms. These forces create conditions in which an individual feels pulled toward absorption into a larger human-material configuration, for better or for worse. Given that they impact individuals who join—or become absorbed in—mediated milieus, collective forces must be taken seriously, whatever their origin. Some collective forces invited robtran to remain in the collective while others alienated him by threatening his sense of self. As long as the goals of collective forces remain in tension, Hayles is correct to refer to Blood Music’s blissful vision of absorbative posthumanism as “improbably idealized.”45
Posthuman Tremendum
In addition to the novel Blood Music, Hayles also drew inspiration from a novel called Terminal Games (1994) by Cole Perriman.46 In this science fiction story, a detective explains that humans experience a feeling called “tremendum” when they encounter death, specifically when they see a dead body. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, “tremendum” is a feeling that combines a sense of mystery, fascination, and repulsion. Metaphorically peering through posthuman portals may evoke a feeling of posthuman tremendum in which one encounters a constellation of forces that influence one’s idealized personhood but are not easily manipulated by individuals. Human agency is to be recognized and respected. Yet, practically speaking, it can be difficult to orchestrate all of the factors—such as algorithmically identified alters—that produce a collective. Creators arguably felt a sense of posthuman tremendum when they experienced a combined sense of mystery and repulsion that emerged from the impact of forces operating outside of yet influencing construction of the self.
Anthropological research in technical realms will continue to include studies of intersecting, parallel, and confrontational sets of collective forces that integrate or reject individual nodes into a collective. It is not precisely accurate to say that a video expresses a preexisting person in part because people’s identities are mutable and because identity is worked out through practices such as mediation. Processes of video creation and distribution crucially influence identification.47 Understanding posthuman tremendum requires exploring individual experiences and concerns that emerge within and across complex, temporally fraught, mediated landscapes—both now and in the future.
Digital Legacies
Life has a particular rhythm, punctuated by a beginning and an end. Technically speaking, one becomes “posthuman” after death. Even the earliest media enabled people to continue past their life cycle, at least in terms of perpetuating their thoughts and productivity through creative works and images. Online videos extend a person’s representational life and challenge the boundaries between a sense of self and alters that may exist in perpetuity. After creators pass away, their media—which obviously can never be the sum total of their lives—take on existences of their own. Nevertheless, people often have definitive ideas about how they would like to craft their digital legacies. Interviews demonstrate that YouTubers had specific—often temporally oriented—visions for how to shape their posthuman identities.
Scholars have analyzed tensions that occur when people represent themselves or someone else through media.48 Biography and autobiography are essentially linked, as it is not possible to tell one’s own story without relating those of others.49 Studies of biography and autobiography show that even during willing collaborations between biographers and subjects, many factors, including asymmetrical professional agendas, anxieties about fidelity to the historical record, and searches for authenticity in self-expression, become fraught with ethical dilemmas.50 Such tensions result in media skirmishes or clashes between creators and users of media in everyday vlogs.51 Family and friends may not always agree on how a person should be depicted.
Representations of desired legacies are becoming increasingly important areas for scholarly fields devoted to understanding mediated self-exploration. Scholars participating in the Death Online Research Network promote the study of how digital media are playing a key role in life experiences such as death and grief.52 A central goal involves analyzing how cultural notions of identity change amid the vast creation and circulation of media representations. Internet studies scholars Tama Leaver and Tim Highfield researched what they characterize as the “ends of identity,” namely birth and death. Leaver and Highfield see these experiences as particularly vulnerable moments given that the subjects of media do not have agency to shape their representations or to choose how those representations should be circulated. They explore how “individuals use visual social media when sharing information about others who cannot speak or interact for themselves: the latter shape the content (and may appear within it), and are responsible for the meaning drawn from it, yet are not directly or explicitly participating.”53
Although Leaver and Highfield pinpoint the “ends” of identity as especially revealing, their contribution invites general exploration about what it means to deal with representations that are created without one’s knowledge, in ways that frame possible interpretations of identity now and in the future. As national governments and corporations push toward a “real name web,” aspects of one’s identity and others’ representations of it may live on indefinitely through digital mechanisms such as keyword tagging and algorithmic links. Their data suggest that in the posthuman sense, death is not truly the “end” of identity. If identity is performative and worked out on a social stage, as argued by renowned sociologist Erving Goffman,54 then Leaver and Highfield rightly ask, “Who builds the stage, and how will the performance be remembered?”55
Living under a posthuman rubric entails confrontation with such issues on a potentially massive scale for ordinary people who might not otherwise have a public persona. These tensions are intertwined with known and unknowable technical manipulations that have not existed to the same extent in previous eras. For example, contested celebrity biographies or paparazzi invasions are par for the course for public figures,56 but the availability of video cameras combined with the ease and openness of online distribution and interaction creates mediated contestations for individuals who would not otherwise find themselves in the public eye. Notably, individuals who create public diaries and web pages for particular audiences have also witnessed struggles over authenticity and privacy.57
Posthuman tendencies observed on the social media site Facebook frequently also apply to YouTube. As a researcher of autobiography and digital life narratives, Laurie McNeill observed that “the close embrace of the corporate, technological, and autobiographical enables the software to play a significant role in directing who users imagine themselves to be.”58 Viewers obviously generate their own interpretations, despite what viewing algorithms return. Nevertheless, anxieties will likely persist and may even become exacerbated, even as policies are privately and legally negotiated.
Communication scholars Dorthe Refslund Christensen and Stine Gotved of the Death Online Research Network describe how digital death has become domesticated and how mediatization—or media logics, economics, and structures—influence societal practices around digital death and expressions of grief.59 Christensen and Gotved distinguish between using digital media to “move on” versus “keeping hold.”60 While the former emphasizes coping with loss, the latter is about reintegrating into society but in a way that establishes “continuing bonds” with the deceased. In the latter model, scholarship focuses on how grieving is not a stage or phase but rather a continuous media ritual.
Anxieties emerge when social media structures, technologies, and services do not map to human coping strategies. For example, one person whom I interviewed pointed out a common anxiety about digital legacies: not all services have policies that respect the wishes of the deceased or their families in terms of the videos, comments, and profile pages that a person leaves behind. A YouTuber with the channel name PrincessDiana161 was a grandmother whom I interviewed in Philadelphia in 2008 about a year and a half after she joined YouTube. A fiercely proud New Yorker, her media reference growing up in Spanish Harlem and working with Mitú, a Latino-based media brand and digital network. Each receiving thousands of views, most of her videos involve cooking themes in which she leads viewers through recipes in lively and humorous ways. As of July 2018, she had 66,208 subscribers. She participated heavily in the social side of YouTube at meet-ups and on the site. For example, she enjoyed responding to “tagging” videos in which she is tagged by another YouTuber to reveal personal facts.
PrincessDiana161 was pained to learn that a family who had lost a son in Iraq did not have access to recent pictures of him and thus could not continue to bond through media. The social media site MySpace reportedly deleted his account after his death. In her interview she stated:
MySpace deletes accounts from people that are deceased. Which is a terrible thing because recently my daughter’s friend died in Iraq and [his] family, the only thing they had was the MySpace account to remember him by, as far as, you know, recent stuff that he had done. And as soon as he died they deleted the account. Let’s hope YouTube never does that. You know?
Leaver states that social media policies with regard to digital death are often “minimal” and “blunt.”61 Services may allow a user’s profile to convert to a “memorial” page. MySpace policies enabled family to delete or preserve a profile as long as accurate documentation of death and family connection could be provided.62 Such policy changes are commensurate with those of services that allow material to be deleted or remain according to the user’s wishes. For example, Facebook users may determine the status of their profile after death by designating a “legacy contact” who would manage the account.63 However, legacy contacts have limited abilities. They are reportedly able to write posts and respond to friend requests, but they cannot see private messages, delete photographs, or delete the whole account.
Google established a similar policy by which users could decide whether to delete some or all of their data after certain periods of time or alternatively, name heirs to be “inactive account managers.”64 YouTube’s policy reportedly requires a death certificate and documents that give account managers power of attorney over the YouTube account. To obtain legal control of the account, applicants must send YouTube their legal name and contact information, including a verifiable email address, and relevant documents.65
Personal or familial preferences about the dispensation of media will likely continue amid uncertainty over social media policies and even legal conflict.66 Leaver recommends that services enable one’s heirs to “curate” a deceased relative’s content “posthumously.”67 He notes that many people handle such decisions in an ad hoc way by leaving their account passwords with immediate family members. However, he argues that the obvious growing demand for managing online digital legacies will necessitate more concrete “policies and practices” that “provide more fine-grained control over the digital legacies.”68
Tensions about media legacies are not new, but emerging configurations of human and technologized collective forces may combine to impact one’s imagined legacy in ways that conjure the posthuman. For example, when one passes away, the collective energies of one’s heirs may conflict with the needs of commercial entities. Heirs may wish to delete popular videos or accounts that still draw eyeballs to a site that wishes to keep them, thus bringing collective forces into ongoing tension. People and other media-driven entities may exhibit a particular type of polyrhythmia, what Lefebvre termed “arrhythmia” or pathologically incompatible rhythms.69 Participatory arrhythmias result over conflicting media ideologies, to use Gershon’s term, about the appropriate temporality of media’s existence.70 While some entities wish to see the media live on indefinitely, others have reasons to discontinue them, thus creating temporally driven conflict.
A person is arguably doubly “posthuman” after death, in part because one no longer takes human form and because our heavily mediated lifestyles mean that our alters live on in myriad forms. Social media engines are even using extractions of media fragments to simulate a contemporary online presence through eerily accurate visual facsimiles.71 Within heavily mediated idioms, one cannot, practically speaking, guarantee a particular legacy. Yet this does not preclude a fundamental human wish to try.
Points of “contact and collision” between human and posthuman experiences became visible when YouTubers were invited to reflect on their desired mediated futures. While recording my ethnographic film Hey Watch This! (2013), several interviewees spoke of battling serious illnesses such as cancers, a temporary inability to walk, and kidney transplants. I learned at a gathering in Philadelphia that some YouTubers had been discussing this theme; thus, it had emerged as an emic, or group insider, issue for them. I asked interviewees if they had reflected on the dispensation of their digital media after they passed away. This line of inquiry was emotionally difficult to discuss, as it confronted all of us with our finitude. Yet interviewees earnestly and frankly engaged in contemplating these matters in fascinating ways. While some interviewees were caught off guard, a few had clearly contemplated this question. One interviewee had created a video to post on YouTube in the event of his passing.
In surveying the literature on research about cultural rituals of death, Christensen and Gotved analyze not only lifestyles but “deathstyles” of online participants. Deathstyle is defined as “the ways in which we perform practices around death.”72 At issue here are digital deathstyles and the ways in which they are handled on multiple levels through videos. Interviewees revealed a surprisingly wide set of attitudes about how their video content should be curated or positioned for a community—and also temporally in terms of how long after their death they imagined their video-mediated legacy to persist. When reflecting on their media’s dispensation and future impact, interviewees frequently considered the wishes of other people, such as family, friends, and their mediated communities.
In general, interviewees’ answers sorted into three categories. In terms of the dispensation of their YouTube accounts, interviewees preferred to (1) have the videos removed just after they passed away; (2) keep the videos but for a limited length of time or have them curated for content or both; (3) leave the videos up as they were for posterity to let others judge and process them in their own way. Many interviewees wanted their media to remain at least for a while in order to showcase different dimension of their personality or to comfort friends, family, and community members. Interviewees illustrated a common contemporary pattern in which people work through grief by visiting social media profile pages, web pages, videos, and sites that contain images of loved ones.73
In terms of temporality, these interviews facilitated a pre-posthuman investigation of interviewees’ visions of their future mediated selves. The answers exhibit a patina of futility because controlling one’s image is difficult at this historical moment of heavily mediated humanity. Interview narratives about digital legacies do not yield predictions about mediated futures as much as they disclose human desires within a mediated present. Anxieties that emerge reveal how our data becomes privileged over our personhood, a classic characteristic of the posthuman condition. As digital media scholar Grant Bollmer explains, “The anxieties of disconnection suggest a larger fear that humans are gradually becoming insignificant in the face of technological networks because data matter more than people.”74 Perhaps ironically, the futility of one’s wishes inevitably brings human dimensions to the fore. Exploring human desires is an area in which anthropology is well suited to bring marginalized humans—who are colliding with posthumanity—back into focus.
“I’m Not Anyone Important. Who’s Gonna Sit There and Cry over Me?”
When analyzing how death is handled, Christensen and Gotved argue that three categories of expression are often apparent: an individual sense of loss; a sense of how a community mourns and commemorates its members; and cultural mourning for people whom survivors may not know personally but whose death has significance (such as political figures or victims of a tragedy in the news).75 Notably, interviewees often oriented around the community level when discussing their envisioned digital deathstyle on YouTube. I interviewed a white man who requested that I refer to him by his nickname of Thor. He felt it important to have a video that alerted the community to what had happened in the event of his passing. His channel on YouTube exhibited a prolific output of comedically inflected video blogs, tutorials on how to use drones and quadcopters, product review videos on devices such as cameras, and vlogs of events and places he had visited. His videos had several hundred to a thousand views each. He had 12,630 subscribers as of June 2018. Attending several meet-ups, he was clearly interested in participating in the social side of YouTube. By the time of his interview in Philadelphia in 2008, he had been participating on YouTube for nearly two years. I asked him if he had considered what would happen to his videos and his YouTube account after his death.
Thor: I would probably like it to, uh, be up just for a little while and then take it down. I’m not anyone important. Who’s going to sit there and cry over me? I’m just another person in this world. It doesn’t matter. I have a video already set for it that my brother knows to upload if something happens to me, and after a couple of weeks, the account goes away.
Patricia: And what—what is the video that your brother is set to upload?
Thor: The video just says that, you know, if you’re looking at this video now, something happened to me. I died. Somehow, some way, I died. And, you know, thanks for everything, I had a good time here, and, and, you know, there’s not much I can say but you know [that’s] the way it is.
Clearly he had contemplated these issues long before the ethnographic interview. He had prepared a video that his brother knew to upload. He described its contents as expressing gratitude to the people who had made YouTube an enjoyable experience. He preferred that the video only remain for “a couple of weeks.” Challenging societal fears about narcissism, he did not wish to have his account remain in perpetuity as a monument to his existence. Interestingly, service providers of social media sites are now acknowledging users’ more specific temporal wishes with respect to the dispensation of their digital alters. Sites are now offering the choice of keeping an account open for three, six, nine, or twelve months after one’s passing.76 Thor crafted his envisioned digital legacy not only around his immediate family and loved ones but also toward fellow YouTubers who he acknowledged might wish to know what had happened and how he had perceived his time on the site.
Thor’s answer was poignant. He eventually wanted his account taken down because he was not “anyone important.” If anything were to illustrate the more negative reading of posthuman sentiment, this would be it. A human individual and his contributions feel insignificant compared with the vast swath of past, present, and future humanity. Yet he was an important person who made a difference to people on YouTube through his videos and his participation.
Thor was not alone in questioning his social legacy. I interviewed a young white woman in Philadelphia just over two years after she joined the site. She asked to be referred to in this study by the name of Veronica. As of July 2018, she had forty-four subscribers. Her video content included mostly vlogs on subjects such as going to college, experiencing a car accident, and debating the greatest athletes of all time. She also posted meet-up videos and footage from places she visited. Her videos each generally garner anywhere from a few dozen to a few thousand views, including one about a meet-up in Philadelphia. She too expressed a wish for her videos to remain, but only for a while. In terms of her digital legacy, she thought it would be interesting to leave up her account so that others could post videos about their memories of her. She stated:
I would actually want someone to probably continue it. And—well, not even continue it for a long period of time. But I would want someone to post a video of how their—people that know me to post videos on what they remember about me. And things like that. And kind of it be archived, that if people want to see. Because it has raw emotion on it. And I don’t think that you get to see that a lot. Like, a lot of people don’t want to open up. And things like that. And I would want to know what people thought about those few videos that I did post and what they did mean to people. So, if it meant anything to anybody. Or if it really showed who I was.
Veronica wondered whether her videos had meaning to others or whether they had revealed who she truly was. She expressed a posthuman desire to see how others react to her passing. She observed that people are generally hesitant to open up emotionally in US culture, a sentiment echoed by other interviewees, and she wondered whether leaving her videos up would help people share their “raw emotions.” In this way, Veronica articulated an idea of making death more visible to enable people to publicly explore emotions, an idea that has been observed in research on digital memorialization.
Cultural sociologist and digital communication scholar Stine Gotved observed that death is often invisible or culturally downplayed. She contemplates the possibility that desires for posthumous representation and memorializing on social media may increase the visibility of dealing with life-cycle issues by closing “the gap between public exposure and private sequestration” that is common in many cultures today.77 Gotved points out that although much has been written about using media to facilitate the grieving process by continuing bonds with the deceased, forging such bonds is not the only dynamic that researchers have observed in digital memorialization. In Veronica’s vision, the media she leaves behind would offer an opportunity for people to experience “raw emotions,” which she believed to be a rare occurrence for many people in the United States. Her media are not only about establishing continuing bonds but also about inviting social and cultural change in handling life-cycle endings through her digital legacy.
Veronica stated that she “would want to know what people thought about those few videos that [she] did post.” Her turn of phrase is interesting because technically after her passing she would not be able to “know” anything. Yet she hoped her videos and others’ memorials could be archived and accessible. She envisioned a space that invited others to contemplate her life and more fully experience their own emotions. In this sense Veronica, as well as Thor, crafted digital deathstyles that accommodated community forms of mourning.
Both Thor and Veronica seemed uncertain about their mediated value to other people, but they handled their doubt in different ways. Thor desired a clean break by having videos deleted relatively quickly. In contrast, Veronica envisioned an archive of memorial videos to her, in part to explore the loyalties and emotions of those whom she left behind.
Representational Curation
Leaving a channel up was not sufficient for some interviewees in terms of shaping their digital legacies. One respondent, whose official name was Ryan Basilio and whose YouTube channel was thetalesend, spoke about having loved ones curate his YouTube channel. The goal was for them to prune away unimportant videos that did not contribute to his self-perception as an engaged member of the YouTube community and society in general.
Sadly, Ryan passed away from cancer in May 2012.78 He was a twenty-nine-year old man of Filipino descent who joined YouTube in 2006, about six months after YouTube formally opened, which makes him an early adopter of the site. His videos were largely direct-camera-address video blogs in which he explored a variety of interesting subjects, including political news events, gay rights, movie reviews, his illness, how to make better videos, his haters, and how YouTube had changed since its inception. Each of his videos received thousands of views, and as of June 2018, he had 1,936 subscribers. Ryan was kind and always willing to help me with my project. He was a friendly person who participated in the social side of YouTube. Even after he became ill, he still took the time to provide tips to others to help them improve their videos and increase the quality of participation on the site.
In an interview in San Francisco, he talked about expending less energy on YouTube and spending more time on a separate live-streaming video site. Over time we became Facebook friends and mutual Twitter followers. At a meet-up in Santa Monica in 2009, about three years after he joined the site, I asked him, as I was asking others, what should happen to his account should he pass away. Looking back, his remarks take on a special poignancy. His comments indicated a change in his perspective since our conversation a year earlier due to health challenges. Ryan said:
Um, I mean, before I think I answered this that, like, I didn’t care, it could just stay up. But, um, since I had the whole—I almost died twice this year—situation happen, um, I think I would like someone to first, uh, delete most of my videos, keep the videos that they think are good, sentimental, something like that. Um, of course I’d have to get someone also to know my password, things like that for me, but, um, I mean it’s—it’s just like Facebook pages or, uh, YouTube pages where people have died. It just kind of keeps living on. [I] would just like to—because there’s a lot of frivolous videos on there. And a lot of people do put frivolous videos on there. And it’s just me responding to people, and things like that.
But I would like, at least, I mean to—to know who I am. [To] be that person who does [the social media] thing, the person who talks about the issues of their time and things like that. I would like that preserved at least. So that other people would know what kind of a person I am. Even if it is edited that way, I just want them to know what—what I believed in. What I was doing at that time.
Ryan expressed an interest in having his account maintained, but after the removal of “frivolous” videos in which he ephemerally responded to other people. He articulates Leaver’s idea of having an ability to curate his own representation, which Leaver anticipates will be a far more common demand on social media services in the future.79 Ryan said he wanted those videos to remain in which he discussed important issues of the day.
Ryan envisioned his voice continuing after his death, showing who he was as a person and how he contributed to civically engaged discourse. In addition to his YouTube vlogs, he was also an iReporter for the CNN.com website, in which citizens sent in video, audio, or image files to report news of interest. After his passing, many of his videos remained on YouTube. As of June 2018, his account included not only serious videos but more comical work, such as a twenty-second video depicting an extreme close-up of him flaring his nostrils. His channel page description remains written in the present tense, with an invitation to contact him via his email account.
All of this information provides evidence of who he was—from a certain point of view. Each video, as well as all the information on his channel page, and the account as a whole represent posthuman “alters.” Ryan wished that others might see him as a civically engaged and caring person, and people who knew him saw him that way. His interview serves as a poignant portal into the human desire to shape one’s legacies, not only for immediate friends and family but for other people over time and across generations to appreciate one’s life and civic contribution.
Generational Knowledge
Whereas some interviews desired eventual removal or curation of videos to shape future reception of digital legacies, others felt it important to leave images behind that showed nuanced dimensions of personhood, including their foibles and social sides. For instance, PrincessDiana161 stated in her interview that, as a grandmother, she would want her YouTube account to remain. She envisioned her digital legacy as one that humanized the figure of a grandmother on the internet for her heirs to enjoy and maintain connections to bond with her. Her hope for a digital legacy that facilitated family ties is a common motivation for retaining media.80 When I asked why she wanted to keep her account open, she stated: “Just for my granddaughter, you know. I would like her to continue—as she gets older. I want her to be able to see grandmommy makin’ a fool of herself on the internet!”
Similarly, a man whom I met at several meet-ups whose YouTube channel name was nbwulf also expressed a desire for his videos to remain so that his children could see different sides of him that were not necessarily revealed in daily family life. Most of the people whom I interviewed were early adopters of the site, and nbwulf was no exception. Nbwulf was a white man and father whose account lists him as joining in April 2006. I interviewed him three years later at a Santa Monica gathering in 2009. As of June 2018, he had 229 subscribers.
Nbwulf’s early vlogs were varied, often showing creative aesthetics and other types of content, such as one in which he slowly comes into focus and reveals a delighted facial expression. As of July 2018, only two videos remained on his account. His two remaining videos each received a few thousand views. Those who try to judge his productivity at a point in time are thus not given the whole picture. In the two remaining videos, footage is generated from a camera mounted on a motorcycle, giving the viewer a feeling of a “ride along” with him. The videos are often sped-up with visual effects and accompanying music.
Although only two videos remain, during our interview in Santa Monica he said he originally envisioned leaving his videos up for his children to enjoy:
I’d want [my channel] left up. I think that, you know, if something did happen to me, I’m kind of glad that I did get involved with YouTube because there’s all these videos and vlogs and things that I’ve made that my kids can see. You know, and it’s like, you know, they can see another side of me where I was interacting with my friends, and interacting with the community, and just talking about life. And, you know, so they can see some of these videos that, [without] YouTube or a site like [it], [I] would have never shot in the first place. [So it’s] similar to back in the day when people would really write detailed diaries. And then you have something to leave behind when people find these later in life and you can really kind of learn more about the personality of a person that you never really saw when you lived with them every single day. Um, so I’d want it—I’d want it left up.
Notably, nbwulf references the predigital paper diary format as analogous to the idea of leaving videos behind that show a side of a person that even close intimates might not see in daily life. Nbwulf made many friends by participating on the site. It is perhaps not surprising that the videos he made with adult friends would have different content and themes than those that he would prefer to experience with his children. He talked about how these sides of himself (or in posthuman terms, “alters”) might never have emerged without YouTube or a site like it to encourage particular kinds of mediated self-expression. Aspects of nbwulf’s identity were collaboratively created in part through YouTube participation.
Nbwulf’s analysis is eloquent and perceptive. He describes how he has mediated himself within the parameters of a particular site, which attracted specific kinds of collective social forces. Who he now is, and who his kids will see, depends upon the fact that he made videos within a specific context. Nbwulf’s narrative exemplifies a temporal orientation to his digital legacy. Although his videos express adult ideas and interactions not always meant for children, they could be shared as kids matured into adults. They would then appreciate nuanced dimensions of their parent’s character, humor, and social life. In this way a closeness and intimacy that may not have been accessible during in-person interaction could become sharable. Nbwulf’s narrative displays an external focus toward his videos’ effects on his children. Interviewees often exhibited an outward focus that considered the influence of their media on other YouTubers and the potential impact of their video legacy on their loved ones’ feelings and wishes.
Community Support
Online memorials offer a source of comfort to people who are grieving.81 Interviewees spoke about how YouTube channels and videos served as sites of memorial for people who were mourning lost friends and relatives. In Ryan’s case his Facebook page reads, “Remembering Ryan Basilio,” and posts show family and friends celebrating his life and expressing their grief. People think about him and mourn him publicly. Posts around his birthday are particularly moving and communicate people’s sense of loss and regret that Ryan tragically passed away at such a young age.
The sudden aspect of people passing is jarring and upsetting. One interviewee talked with sensitivity about the value of YouTube videos as not only sites of individual memorials but as a means of dealing with communal grief. Susan (a researcher-assigned pseudonym) was a white woman whom I surmised to be in her thirties. I interviewed her at a meet-up in Philadelphia in 2008, about two years after she had joined the site. Typically, each of her videos received a few hundred to thousands of views. In a video in 2009, she observed that she had some 3,300 subscribers. We spoke about a range of subjects, including her perception of participatory dynamics on YouTube. She was deeply religious and very proud of videos she had made in which she had expressed her faith.
In response to a question about what should happen to her account should she pass away, Susan emphasized the videos’ ability to facilitate community mourning. When YouTube friends of hers had passed away, she felt comforted by connecting with them through their videos and account pages. She said:
That’s a really good question because [in] some of my early videos I shared my personal faith a great deal and I would definitely want those on there. They’re not there currently, um, because a glitch happened and I lost all my videos. But, um, I shared my faith and I think that was very important. [Those] are the best videos I’ve ever made. And I would want those out there. If I were to die, I would really want the videos to remain. Not as a testimony to who I am but as a member of a community. There have been a few deaths in our community. Um, a couple that I was very close to. One was FreeWingz and he died of a massive heart attack very unexpectedly at the age of thirty-three. And I’m subscribed to him and he’s subscribed to me and there’s no way on God’s green earth I’ll ever unsubscribe from him. And I visit his page as a memorial. And so, not that I would necessarily want people visiting my page, but I think that certain people I’ve grown closer to might want to.
Susan emphasized how YouTube pages and videos might facilitate handling grief within a community of friends. She describes how she lost friends on the site, such as a man of Vietnamese descent named FreeWingz (his YouTube channel name) who suffered from polio and whom Susan recalls dying of a heart attack in his thirties. She remained devoted to keeping their technical links alive, for example, through the feature of YouTube subscriptions.
FreeWingz vlogged and created clever special-effects videos, typically garnering thousands of views for each of his videos. He joined in 2006, seven months after YouTube opened to the public. His subscriber count was modest, listed as 217 as of June 2018. In one video entitled VLog to GOD—PART ONE—(The Voices of Creation), FreeWingz records a message to God in which he confesses that he has not created vlogs lately. His mind goes blank and he loses his voice. He tells God he loves Him and asks for help in gaining inspiration for another vlog. Comedically, a majestic voice off camera begins calling his name and soft music plays. FreeWingz presses his face to the lens and asks who the being is and how this being got into his camcorder. The video ends with a black title card and white writing saying, “coming soon. VLog to GOD—PART TWO—(Walking with Satan).” His humor and creativity are touching and apt for the YouTube environment, in which life and afterlife may be viewed through a lens. His work invites viewers to empathetically connect with his life and the challenges he faced.
Susan’s wish to stay connected to FreeWingz illustrates how a combination of emotional, social, and technological collective forces create posthumanity. Susan wished to preserve technologized links between her and friends who had passed away. She confirms that “there’s no way on God’s green earth I’ll ever unsubscribe from him,” exhibiting a more positive, collective form of the posthuman that emphasizes eternal connection. Susan said that she sometimes visits FreeWingz’s page as a memorial, much the way one would pay one’s respects to deceased loved ones by visiting their tombstones at a cemetery. She expressed an interest in keeping her videos up, not for her own legacy but as an acknowledgment of others’ need to connect, pay respects, and mourn by interacting and maintaining “continuing bonds” through images left behind on YouTube.
Susan and her friend FreeWingz remained linked not just generally through media but through the feature of a video subscription that implies a live link between a viewer and video maker. Temporality becomes elided in the posthuman collective. The idea behind subscriptions connotes the potential for receiving alerts about new, forthcoming material. Of course, there will be no new videos from FreeWingz himself. The account might produce new material, such as memorials, if others maintain the account and are granted an ability to post on it. Even though FreeWingz will not be posting new videos, the feature nevertheless shapes the parameters of the quality and type of memorial interaction that may occur between viewers and the deceased. Rhythmically speaking, it fuses a present temporality to a past friendship dynamic. Future studies of posthuman memorials should consider how posthuman configurations take shape through temporally asymmetrical, experiential features and the interactive expectations and resulting emotional impact that those features suggest. It is powerful and perhaps comforting to believe a live link exists through an ongoing feature such as a subscription, even though the person has passed away.
A pattern emerged to suggest that participants often crafted their legacies in anticipation of how other people might feel about the continuation of their media. Some YouTubers focused on having their site maintained for community purposes. Others advocated maintaining it only for a short period of time or deleting it altogether, as maintaining their legacy seemed unimportant. Not all interviewees shared the idea that videos should remain to keep their legacy alive. Perhaps individuals who feel insignificant deserve even more attention as their alters continue to thrive and inspire others within a posthuman, mediated ecology. In the future an important role for anthropologists and visual ethnographers will be to create alters that highlight the marginalized, human aspect of individual voices that may become lost amid mediated swaths of posthumanity.
Digital Migration
Lefebvre asserted that the media “day” never ended and in fact had “neither beginning nor end.”82 Nevertheless, YouTube’s viewing and participatory cycles apparently parallel human rhythms of work and play. For example, viewership on YouTube peaks in the afternoon in the United States during weekdays and in the late morning on weekends (Eastern Standard Time).83 Highly trafficked viewing windows correspond to the times when people have free time outside of work and school. Research suggests that viewing times vary according to the device that is used,84 but in general viewership peaks on the weekends, with a low point beginning on Monday.
Websites are also impacted by human usage, suggesting a posthuman link between humans and technology. Interviewees say that websites such as YouTube do not last particularly long. Their narratives and ethnographic observations indicated that perhaps the most intensive use for this social crowd occurred over a three-year period (although for some the cycle was slightly longer at five years). Over time, YouTube’s intensity of usage cooled for those creators and video bloggers who migrated to other sites such as Facebook and Twitter.85 I define digital migration as a transfer of intensity of participation to a different online site or service in response to changing user preferences, desires, and platform modifications. Three types of digital migration occurred on YouTube: radical migration, conceptual migration, and in-migration.
In radical migration people basically stop using a particular medium and migrate completely to another service without much consideration of the earlier site. A person’s account on that site may be deleted or left open to atrophy. The second type of migration is more subtle. It constitutes a conceptual migration, in which people may cease or vastly reduce their usage of a site; yet it nevertheless serves as an orienting social context that influences people’s interaction on other sites. For example, a person might abandon YouTube but provide a link to the social media site they are currently using to keep social connections to YouTubers. Continuing to engage with YouTube friends on another site constitutes a conceptual migration that brings the former framework to a different site. Although not exhibiting the traumatic and emotional rupture of diasporic people’s violent separation from a homeland, conceptual migrations similarly bring meaningful identifications of prior sites to sociality experienced in new digital milieus.86 People who stopped using YouTube but continued to meet up with people whom they thought of as “YouTube friends” on other sites were enacting this type of conceptual digital migration. For example, Thor’s Twitter account description reads: “I suck More so you can suck Less . . . Sucking at Youtube Since 2006.” Clearly his persona on Twitter orients toward YouTube, such that Twitter becomes a means to express a YouTube-inflected persona and related social connections.
A third type of digital migration is in-migration, in which people remain on the same site, in this case YouTube, but switch intensity of participation to a different YouTube channel that they create. A new channel page that updates one’s video catalogue may more accurately reflect current interests. I went through an in-migration when I switched accounts from an experimental channel I started in May 2006 to AnthroVlog, which I launched in May 2007. I opened the earlier account because I wanted to learn to vlog, but I did not widely publicize my initial efforts. After switching to AnthroVlog, I left my prior channel open but stopped using it. YouTubers might delete an old account and start anew, or they might keep both channels alive. In-migration implies that they divert intensity of participation to a new channel. At times YouTubers do not necessarily decrease intensity on old channels but rather engage in more expansive video making, in which they participate across multiple accounts that serve different purposes. This is an additive approach rather than a migration away from something.
Online participants might migrate when a social media site lost its cool factor or became less community oriented. At a meet-up in Santa Monica in 2009, I interviewed a documentary filmmaker called K80Blog (her YouTube channel name) who discussed her views on YouTube’s changing focus away from sociality. K80Blog was a white woman in her late twenties who had been participating on the site for about three years. Her videos each typically received thousands of views. As of June 2018, she had 13,343 subscribers. She vlogged on an array of topics: having a bad hair cut, discussing her film, trips to the dentist, and going to events such as YouTube gatherings and the film festival South by Southwest. She enjoyed the social aspects of the site and cited commercial saturation as a key reason why she believed YouTube’s popularity was waning. K80Blog stated:
I think [YouTube is] on its way out [nods head]. I mean, you know, MySpace had its time, uh, Facebook might be on its way out as well. Twitter will be, you know, I mean. That’s what’s interesting, like websites, they don’t last very long. Yeah, I think YouTube is on its way out. I think it’s because it became so corporate and there’s so much about advertising that I think a lot [of] people are turned off. And maybe just the novelty of it has kind of worn away.
K80Blog and other interviewees intuitively identify an online rhythm of websites and how they work. They gain momentum, in part, because they are “novel.” They have their “time” and then people lose interest and migrate to other sites after a few years. K80Blog talked about migrating to Twitter. For K80Blog, Twitter helped her keep connected to the YouTube community, thus enacting a conceptual migration. She used Twitter to promote her documentary by alerting her Twitter followers to screenings of her film. She also appreciated observing Twitter users as they discussed her film during a screening. Conceptual migration does not mean that her Twitter feed is filled only with YouTubers. It simply indicates a preference to interact with a recognizable group of YouTube friends on a platform other than YouTube while retaining its conceptual and social connotations.
A video blogger from outside of YouTube alerted me to Twitter and suggested that I obtain an account, which I did in 2009. I began following YouTubers on Twitter. Many of the people whom I met at gatherings and who enjoyed YouTube sociality began using it too. In some cases Twitter became another way of sharing YouTube videos, as it was possible to post links to videos in its brief messages. One creator who vlogged outside of YouTube said that it was easier to keep in close contact with vlogging friends via Twitter rather than through video blogs, which felt like static video-hosting web pages rather than interactive platforms. Over time I began following other colleagues and Twitter accounts of interest, but a visible contingent of YouTubers still forms a large part of my contact list on Twitter. Personally, I still think of this group as “YouTubers” rather than “Twitter friends,” even though technically they are both.
While K80Blog described a significant decrease in intensity of her YouTube usage, other YouTubers talked about Twitter as simply being an additional service to use. Nbwulf, for example, enjoyed the social aspect of YouTube and told me that his Twitter participation was just an addition to his YouTube participation rather than a direct replacement. In response to a question about whether he had migrated to Twitter, he stated, “Some people might see it as a migration because of the lack of activity on YouTube, but it’s not.” Nbwulf eventually removed most of his YouTube videos and simply left contact information on his YouTube channel that referenced a Twitter account name and a gaming contact. Providing information about the Twitter account suggests that it had become a key way for him to communicate with YouTube-centric and other friends. Prior to his decrease in video productivity, nbwulf insisted that the move did not represent a full-fledged migration. This dissonance between his video output and his image of continued YouTube participation bolsters the argument that YouTube retained social vitality and that his migration conceptually retained a notion of YouTube even off the site.
The posthuman collective evidenced distress when YouTubers suddenly migrated away or their account went quiet through a disruption in the posting of new videos. Learning that someone had deleted or abandoned a channel prompted questions of concern from those left behind. Supporters might take active steps to locate a YouTuber’s social media destination(s) to discern their status. Such digital detective work might be conducted to relieve anxiety or at least confirm that a YouTuber was alive and well.
Feelings of concern about missing YouTubers were well articulated in a video entitled Disappearing YouTubers, which was posted on July 9, 2017, by Tony Huynh, a popular video maker who was known more widely by his YouTube channel name, thewinekone. A very early adopter who joined when YouTube had just opened to the public in mid-December 2005, he had participated on the site for over eleven years when he posted this video. Thewinekone was an Asian-Canadian man in his mid-thirties whom I observed at a gathering in Toronto. He had amassed a following due to his humorous vlogs on subjects such as trolls, pick-up lines, singing songs, snow days, being stalked for his YouTube fame, problems with rude movie goers, and critiques of bad YouTube vlogs. Each of his videos received thousands and sometimes even tens of thousands of views. As of June 2018, he had 120,203 subscribers.
Disappearing YouTubers documents the discomfort people feel when creators stop posting videos and the active steps that viewers and supporters take to locate them. Viewers may experience genuine concern if social media links have disappeared or life updates have ceased, suggesting potentially difficult times—or even death. In the video thewinekone states:
I hate when YouTubers disappear for a long time and I’m stuck wondering, where the hell did they go? So then I have to resort to looking up their Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook—all their social media, just to see what they’re up to and that in turn makes me feel like a creepy cyber-stalker. More so than I already am. The worst is when I found out that they haven’t posted anything on social media so I’m stuck wondering, what the hell happened to them? Was there a life-changing moment for them and they had to ditch the internet? Or did they just not feel like posting anything? Or did they actually die? I mean, you never know with some of them, especially the ones that don’t share much about their personal life. Like, who would I even have to look for to find out if they’re doing okay? And sometimes they pop up out of the blue with no explanation, no update as to what has been going on. It’s like I’ve invested so much time, months, maybe even years, in watching you, supporting you, following you, and you don’t even tell me what’s been going on with your life? You act like everything’s completely normal and you haven’t been gone for half a year. That’s weird.
In a posthuman configuration those left behind in the collective may feel a sense of loss or discomforting disconnection when people pass away or leave the site without explanation. I experienced these feelings when a YouTuber whom I had hung out with at gatherings deleted his YouTube account and severed other social media links. People may simply change creative direction or may be dealing with serious problems, as reportedly happened to thewinekone himself—a fact that perhaps motivated his concern about others. According to his Wikipedia page, he took a break from YouTube in 2014 due to an “undisclosed illness” but retains a “cult-like” following despite his slow upload schedule of one video every few months.87
Notably, his narrative exhibits a strong temporal orientation. He discusses anxieties arising from concern for other people as well as from his and others’ need to be informed given that they had attended to another person’s work over time. In his video thewinekone emphasizes the temporal sacrifice one makes for other video makers, including the “months, maybe even years” that he has spent paying attention to them through their media. He implies that the personal investment of his scarce life resource to someone else’s work reciprocally merits an update where possible. People may exhibit asymmetrical allegiances to the posthuman collective, which for some may be rooted in temporal contributions that support individuals to keep them connected.
Is There a Post-YouTube?
Ethnographic data from video sharing invites philosophical reflection on the posthuman status of technologized devices and services. Websites do not stand alone but are embedded in competing and interconnected media ecologies within which people interact. Even during YouTube’s height, YouTubers had always expanded their sociality to multiple modalities while still seeing YouTube as an orienting framework for sociality. For example, several interviewees noted that they used a live video chat site called Stickam to connect with other YouTubers.88 Many interviewees met with “YouTube friends” on Stickam.
One interviewee, whose YouTube channel name was anakin1814, posted a video on March 15, 2008, called YouTube Community: Season 2, in which he reflected on his media behavior as situated within a larger media ecology. A white man in his mid-thirties, anakin1814 vlogged in ways that were often thoughtful and personal rather than aimed at widely accessible comedic or viral fare. He sensitively vlogged about a wide variety of topics, including art, guilty pleasures, YouTube community issues, birthday greetings, the environment, and music. Although a few videos saw a thousand views, most of his videos received a few hundred views. As of June 2018, he had 2,490 subscribers. At the time of this video, anakin1814 had been on YouTube for about two years. He discussed how YouTube was used not in isolation but rather along with other social media sites. Despite the number of sites in which he participated, he described how YouTube retained a special importance within his personal media ecology. In his video he stated:
So many of the relationships I have on here that have extended now into Facebook and Twitter and Skype and Stickam and Yahoo IM and MySpace. It’s all about a community. And it seems like YouTube, though, is the mother ship; it’s the portal and all these other things are conduits. You know, I was a MySpacer before I was ever on YouTube, and the amount of friends I have on there is changing; it’s all more of a place to collect my internet friends now and some real-life friends.
Anakin1814 used multiple media, such as the live video-streaming service Stickam, to engage with YouTubers. Media scholars Jean Burgess and Joshua Green also observed that Stickam functioned as a “supplement” or “plug-in” to YouTube early on.89 For YouTubers whom I interviewed, it similarly functioned as an additive satellite site to YouTube. Its use did not constitute a radical migration but rather expansively extended interactions and relationships that originated through YouTube. In other cases or over time, social media sites replaced YouTube as it cooled in popularity. After experiments with live streaming concerts, sports, and interviews, YouTube offered a live video-streaming option in 2011,90 which some pundits argued contributed to Stickam’s eventual demise in 2013.91 Nevertheless, for anakin1814, YouTube functioned as the “mother ship” or the orienting “portal” that provided a gateway to his other “internet friends.” Even though he used many different sites, the concept of YouTube anchored his conceptualization of his internet-based, media ecology.
Websites, like people, exhibit existential cycles. People are born, live, and die, and so do websites in a sense. Websites are created, people use them, intensity reaches a peak, and eventually people go away or websites change with regard to their usage. Some websites actually “die” if they are shut down, as happened with sites such as blip.tv or Stickam.92 Sites may also effectively die when people leave or stop using them.
Sites may remain technically open but be “dead” because they are irrelevant, as reportedly happened with MySpace.93 Indeed, one pundit has even used the term “MySpace dead” to talk about a certain type of website death, which means the site is still up but is not widely used or considered relevant, even though it was used by many people between 2005 and 2009, perhaps even the majority of US teens.94 The concept of digital deathstyle may be applied to understand not just human processes of death but also nuances in different trajectories of website usage, intensity, decline, and demise. If a site’s operators are clever, they may find ways to adapt amid changing media styles. An attempt was made on MySpace to reposition itself for musicians, who formed a key initial demographic for the site.95 If a site cannot maintain active usage, it may die or remain only nominally open, effectively becoming “MySpace dead.”
Alternatively, groups of people may migrate to other sites in ways that conceptually retain the idea and sociality of the original site in which they interacted, as was the case for several YouTubers in this study. In this way YouTube lives on in a “post-YouTube mediascape,”96 in which its social connotations migrate to different social media. Although many interviewees now gather on other social media sites, they interact as YouTubers through their conceptual migration. They share YouTube videos and discuss YouTube-related topics on Twitter and Facebook.
Through multiple trajectories of usage, a site called YouTube has given rise to numerous YOUTUBE alters. Here capital letters are used to distinguish between a website that everyone “knows about” through a singular, monolithic narrative, to a concept depicting the multiplicity of versions of the site in a way that visually echoes the literary connotation from posthuman fiction. The original YOUTUBE in which interviewees posted communicative videos continues for some, while for others it is more of a social framework or even a future ideal. A contingent of YouTubers interacts via Twitter, thus creating a YOUTUBE alter on Twitter. To talk about YouTube as a single site elides its complexity and varied trajectories of usage over time, as well as different versions of YOUTUBE, past and present. Drawing inspiration from posthuman fiction helps envision myriad conceptual YOUTUBE alters that can never be identical but nevertheless connote key nuances and dimensions of use.
One may apply similar lessons from reflections on how “the Internet” is often treated as a singular entity to rethink and recognize multiple conceptions of YouTube. Indeed, as I have pointed out elsewhere, “Frameworks that treat ‘the computer’ and ‘the Internet’ as singular entities that are distinct from other realms potentially smuggle in a researcher’s prior assumptions about what these entities connote to them, what capabilities they offer, what limitations they have, and what people experience when using them.”97 As media studies scholar Kevin Driscoll and information science researcher Camille Paloque-Berges argue, “The Internet has always been multiple,” and thus histories of particular forms of usage are required to understand its sociological and technical trajectories.98 One may make a similar argument about YouTube, which from its inception enabled numerous pathways of usage, including notions of community, revenue, performance, sharing, and uncertain digital legacies as well as multiple levels of social intensity. In line with the findings of Driscoll and Paloque-Berges, many histories of YouTube are required to understand its impact. Driscoll and Paloque-Berges encourage scholars to “find and document hidden histories, obscure sources, and less visible networks” and to recognize how sites exhibit “uncertain or inconsistent temporalities.”99
As newcomers arrive, they too may find a niche for expressing vernacular voices that create new YOUTUBE alters. Indeed, new groups invoke community rhetoric that calls forth aspects of identity or shared interests when participating on the site. For instance, Asian and Asian American video makers are active on YouTube in part through popular channels run by Ryan Higa (whose YouTube channel is nigahiga), Kevin Wu (whose YouTube name was KevJumba), and Christine Gambito (known on YouTube as HappySlip, whom I interviewed for this study). This activity has given rise to what scholars characterize as the “Asian/Asian-American YouTube community.”100 Scholars studying trans and queer populations have also noted how vloggers have bonded through participation on the site and have recently observed an active “trans YouTube community.”101 Researchers have observed that people with mental illnesses, such as bipolar disorder, turn to YouTube to create communities, find support, and establish connection by sharing their experiences.102
YouTube has spawned a “protoindustry” of what communication and media scholars Stuart Cunningham and David Craig characterize as “social media entertainment” or “communitainment,” which draws on the technical and networking affordances of social media to produce mass forms of entertainment.103 Characterized by innovative content and “nontraditional media ownership,” such approaches offer opportunities for alternative voices to find a platform. For Cunningham and Craig, communitainment involves intensive interactivity and content but is also “driven by an ethos of community” that sets the genre apart from traditional media. Examples appear in the many communities on YouTube that revolve around common interests such as gaming. For example, many kids enjoy watching older teens navigate the sandbox creation game of Minecraft through multiple genres, one of which includes “Let’s Play” videos. These videos provide comedic commentary as a player moves through a game. Scholars refer to groups on YouTube who bond through the game as the “Minecraft YouTube community,” which has fostered collaborative learning.104 Communitainment typically depends on combining aspects of entertainment, such as gaming, with unique communicative commentary from creators as well as interaction between video makers and audiences.
As they migrate, interactants are all creating and experiencing “post-YouTube” alters via other sites, platforms, and subgroups on the site. A kaleidoscope of YOUTUBES now potentially reconceives its original meaning both within the site and across digital realms. Each of these, as Driscoll and Paloque-Berges suggest, should be examined as important alternative narratives that challenge the typical representation of a single website marching toward what is often portrayed as a teleological trajectory of monetization, professionalism, and what interviewees characterize as a systematic stifling of the vernacular.
Clashes with the posthuman may take many forms, some of them encouraging, some of them distressing. As people in media-making environments see themselves drowning in a sea of alters, anthropologists and visual ethnographers will quite likely feel a responsibility to bring visibility to those who see themselves as unimportant or who become lost in the media shuffle. Anthropologists and ethnographers have always been attuned to raising awareness about marginalized voices. In this case the problem is not video narcissism but rather its opposite: a profoundly anxious feeling of being inhumanely ignored or, perhaps even worse, distressingly distorted in media. Video creators’ poignant, emotional, civic, and funny videos are antidotes for the disorienting feeling of posthuman tremendum. By the same token, perhaps it will be a posthuman collective that ultimately provides reassurance and connection. In response to creators’ laments about who will cry over them, perhaps it is time for anthropologists to cry—and laugh—a little.