3
Growing Closer
Sharing Time and Space
At a YouTube meet-up called SouthTube I experienced southern hospitality at its finest. Attendees socialized on white rocking chairs on the porch of a resort in Marietta, Georgia. Activities included dance parties and a hot dog roast in a beautiful, wooded park. In Minneapolis a group of us unleashed our deep-seated media nostalgia as we belted out the lyrics to The Mary Tyler Moore Show theme song on city streets. In Philadelphia I caught the gaming action at Dave & Buster’s video arcade and saw the Liberty Bell, which I had not seen since I was a child. At the Ontario Science Centre in Toronto I learned about science during the day and sang songs at night around a hotel piano. In Santa Monica I sat by the ocean and shot the breeze amid a breathtaking coastal setting. These are a few of the many experiences I had when traipsing around the country following YouTubers as they gathered together. This chapter analyzes how YouTubers intensified their participation through meeting up with other video makers. In terms of the Lefebvrian cycle, it builds on the prior chapter’s analysis of initiation to address the growth phase by examining how YouTubers gathered in person to create a sense of belonging.
Meet-ups were extremely important to YouTubers. Opportunities for attending large-scale gatherings were limited, which prompted them to cherish them all the more. Part of what made the gatherings rewarding was that YouTubers could share in a collective sense of togetherness with other people who felt marginalized. YouTubers complained that family and even most friends were not interested in videos or YouTube. Meeting up stimulated feelings of connection with others who held similar interests and with whom YouTubers had been interacting through other media and back channels.
This chapter argues that YouTube is productively conceptualized as a mediascape rather than a single website. Analyzing how YouTubers emplaced the site by meeting in specific locations at gatherings reveals how they drew on multiple, mediated modalities to intensify sociality. According to anthropologist Sarah Pink, an “emplaced ethnography” is one that “attends to the question of experience by accounting for the relationships between bodies, minds, and the materiality and sensoriality of the environment.”1 Although ethnographers may never experience exactly what others feel and sense, we can co-experience place to develop a deeper understanding of mediated human experience.
In line with a growing chorus of digital scholarship, this chapter’s position is that online and offline binaries present problems for understanding contemporary mediated experience. So-called online and offline experiences are integrated in our lives and temporally inter-threaded. Internet studies scholar Annette Markham referred to internet life as a “way of being.”2 YouTubers did not gather in person because they saw being online as a flawed experience but because they wished to continue interaction across different forms of mediation that interwove various sensorial and experiential dimensions. At the same time, YouTubers’ experiences were not always seamless as they attempted to interact across multiple modalities.
This chapter argues that YouTubers conceived of the site in democratized ways. Studying their forms of emplacement reveals that their models of participation embraced access for all. They rejected hierarchical forms of celebrity and conceptualized meet-ups in ways that invited diversity. They often saw in-person gatherings as reunions, a key way in which YouTubers sought to renew their sociality among people from diverse demographic groups—who happened to share an interest in YouTube.
The chapter will begin by describing the ethnographic context of the research. It will then show how gatherings enact scholarly ideas of emplacement through YouTubers’ transformation of spaces into places of socialization. It will analyze how meet-ups illustrated YouTubers’ goals for democratized participation. Dynamics of emplacement reveal how YouTube exceeds the parameters of a website and becomes more of a social ideal. The chapter will demonstrate how emplaced interaction stimulated feelings of communitas, or joy of being together in a place away from society and from those who marginalized the YouTube experience.
The chapter will introduce several theoretical concepts that assist in analyzing the relationship between time, place, and mediation. It draws on the idea of the chronotope, which literally means “time/space.” Chronotopes integrate notions of time and space in ways that express cultural values.3 A classic example is the idea of a “threshold,” which holds meaning as a person crosses a temporal and spatial divide in personally significant ways. YouTubers oriented around meet-ups as chronotopes because each gathering occurred at a particular time and place and exhibited strong cultural and social connotations. The chapter introduces the theoretical concept of chronotopic chains of sociality, which link ideas of time and place to explain how YouTubers regenerated interpersonal connections.
YouTube sociality illustrates how people coming together from disparate backgrounds create collective spatiotemporal frames of reference. The chapter will demonstrate how chronotopes and subsequent chronotopic chains of interaction enabled YouTubers to build shared histories and collective memories. Given that space and time are inevitably linked, the chapter will also show how YouTubers’ own videos about gathering in places display strong temporal dimensions that reveal how YouTubers conceptualized the video-sharing platform as an organizing framework for participatory sociality.
The chapter analyzes multiple forms of modal fungibility to illustrate the multi-threaded character of mediated interaction. The chapter introduces the notion of participatory fungibility, which refers to whether properties of interaction are interchangeable. The data reveal three types of fungibility: emotional, experiential, and physical. The chapter argues that YouTubers articulated emotional fungibility in which strong feelings became interchangeable across various modalities of communication. At the same time, many people experienced frictions such as an inability to afford long-distance travel, which revealed a lack of physical fungibility between interactive modalities. Such challenges meant that when video makers could attend a meet-up, a tangible sacrifice was made and appreciated. The chapter will conclude by analyzing participatory frictions and how YouTubers dealt with them to intensify their collective sense of belonging in a video-sharing group.
Origins and Dynamics of Meet-Ups
This chapter draws on observations and interviews conducted at nine grassroots YouTube events. The nine gatherings were held in the following cities: New York City (2007); Marietta, Georgia (2007); Los Angeles (Hollywood; 2008); San Francisco (2008); San Diego (2008); Minneapolis (2008); Philadelphia (2008); Toronto, Canada (2008); and Santa Monica (2009). I also attended one commercial event, VidCon (2016), in Anaheim, California. Informal YouTube meet-ups were occurring at least once every other month during the primary research period in the United States and Europe. For practical purposes many YouTubers only attended one or two major gatherings per year. A search for YouTube meet-ups on the site in 2018 revealed informal gatherings continuing to occur in New York City (2017), Phoenix, Arizona (2017), Raleigh, North Carolina (2016), and Kobe, Japan (2013).
At meet-ups I hung out with YouTubers and engaged in activities such as attending dinners and sight-seeing. In Toronto I even briefly braved the chaos of a jumpy house while the event’s organizer (also an interviewee) kindly watched my purse. I conducted video-blogging-style interviews that examined how meet-ups were conceived and why individual organizers chose to helm one. Organizers typically selected a venue that set the tone for the gathering. For instance, the gathering at the Ontario Science Centre was launched to promote the facility’s goals, which included supporting science education.
Making and sharing videos at gatherings was a crucial activity at all events. Throughout this chapter—and in a section specifically addressing video temporality—the analysis draws on an examination of a corpus of meet-up videos made by YouTubers. To select appropriate videos for the research, I used a “purposeful sampling approach” by searching for keywords and phrases such as “Philadelphia meet-up” or “Midwest gathering.” Using YouTube’s “relevance filter,” I examined roughly the first five videos returned for each keyword, for a total of 50 videos. I limited my analysis to videos for which I had context of the event. “Purposeful samples” differ from random samples in that the former require selecting relevant examples according to the needs, parameters, and research questions of a particular study.4 Rather than relying on a random sample that returned videos from people and meet-ups outside the study, the idea was to examine videos from events organized and attended by interviewees and the researcher. YouTubers’ videos document interviewees’ experiences. They depict how YouTubers engaged in inter-threaded interactions that included past reflections as well as anticipation of future meet-ups in ways that highlighted their social dynamics.
Most of the meet-ups that I attended were organized by YouTubers to meet people, make videos, and expand people’s video-based networks. Even meet-ups with hundreds of attendees were organized in a grassroots way. According to the people whom I interviewed, YouTube did not arrange or provide financial support for such gatherings, other than at times donating modest gifts to be distributed at the meet-ups, such as free T-shirts with YouTube logos. One organizer said he received funds for a small dinner that a few of us attended after a gathering. Organizers chose a venue and publicized the meet-up through promotional videos that provided information and raised enthusiasm for forthcoming events. Videos included practical information such as hotels, directions, nearby activities, and lists of attendees. While some meet-ups involved hanging out in public places such as parks, others were more ambitious and organized social mixers, dinners, and activities.
Obtaining precise attendance figures was difficult given that tickets were not sold and people traversed them fluidly, coming and going in parks and public squares. Organizers estimated about a thousand people attending the meet-up in New York City. The Toronto, Marietta, and San Francisco meet-ups were also quite crowded with what appeared to be hundreds of attendees. Of the meet-ups I attended, the Santa Monica gathering saw the fewest YouTube participants. About fifteen people showed up to chat by the beach.
Notably, people sometimes came from far away to attend the larger gatherings. Videochick770 (her YouTube channel name) was a white woman in her forties who organized the meet-up at the Ontario Science Centre in Toronto after she had been participating on the site for about two years. She operated a channel on behalf of the center, posting videos about science that each received thousands of views. As of June 2018, the site had 819 subscribers, although she has since moved on to other projects. She told me that hundreds of attendees for that gathering came from places as far away as the Netherlands, Trinidad, Argentina, England, Ireland, and Australia to meet up with friends whom they initially encountered on the site.
Interviewing people at meet-ups presented challenges. Time was at a premium during meet-ups, which often took place over an afternoon. The larger meet-ups occurred over the course of a couple of days. Although many YouTubers generously agreed to participate in my study by being interviewed on camera, I tried to remain sensitive to their time constraints and kept video interviews at gatherings relatively brief (under twenty minutes on average). I preferred interviewing people in person, as this felt warmer, facilitated my visual ethnography project, secured an immediate interview, and provided a way for the interviewee to share impressions about activities at gatherings as they were occurring in real time.
The first gathering I attended was the historic meet-up in New York City in 2007. At the time, I was on my way to Europe from California for an academic conference. After seeing some promotional videos about it on YouTube, I decided to make a stop in New York for the gathering. I had no idea what to expect. A feeling tone of palpable excitement permeated promotional videos as well as experiences during the event. Posting videos easily without corporate or institutional assistance had only just become possible for experienced video makers prior to YouTube’s launch in 2005, but the site greatly helped nonspecialists share videos widely. It became apparent that YouTubers saw the gathering as a historical moment in the trajectory of vernacular video and that meet-ups of this kind were an important locus of study for understanding the YouTube experience. Seeing the excitement and depth of feeling that attendees exuded at the New York gathering inspired me to travel to other meet-ups to compare their activities, rhythms, and forms of mediation. Of particular importance was analyzing how YouTube became more than a video-sharing platform; it became temporally ensconced in physical places in ways that highlighted YouTubers’ social investment in the site.
Emplacement
Over the past few decades, the role of place in anthropological research has undergone revision. Doing “fieldwork” by conducting research in a circumscribed location has changed as anthropologists now study diverse social arrangements such as diasporic cultures, migrant workers, and people who interact across media, to name just a few.5 Provocations about place and emplacement have also appeared within the emerging field of sensory ethnography. Drawing on scholarship in anthropology, human geography, and philosophy, anthropologist Sarah Pink describes how place is not a physical location but rather is highly conceptual. Under this rubric the concept of place “occurs” as a kind of “event” that gathers and weaves together entanglements of animate and inanimate people and things. Whether this type of gathering together is planned or ad hoc, it creates intense feelings and memories.6
Pink proposes that ethnographers become more attuned to how interviewees and ethnographers are emplaced and how these entanglements with place influence interviews, ethnographic encounters, and ethnographic representations of people in places. She argues that ethnographers cannot escape conducting research in embodied and emplaced ways. By becoming more sensitive to their own and their interviewees’ sensations and rhythms, ethnographers can “begin to become involved in making places that are similar to theirs and thus feel that [they] are similarly emplaced.”7 Attending to ever-changing and co-constructed aspects of place is important for achieving interpersonal understanding. Pink argues, “By sitting with another person in their living room, in their chair, drinking their coffee from one of their mugs, or when drinking together in a café, one begins in some small way to occupy the world in a way that is similar to them” (emphasis original).8
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word “emplacement” entered the lexicon from the French in the nineteenth century to combine the notion of em (in) with place. Emplacement traditionally refers to relocating and positioning a physical thing such as a sculpture into a fixed place where it will remain over the course of time. Such everyday connotations of the fixity of emplacement does not adequately convey the more dynamic vision of how place is conceptualized and experienced by YouTube participants.9 In the YouTube case, places, interactions, and their representations through videos were constantly in flux.
In this chapter the term emplacement engages with a more dynamic connotation as implied by Pink and others. Emplacement in the video-making context refers to how sets of mediated interactions or experiences become meaningfully associated with or influenced by physical places. Mediated interaction is infused into places, and experiences that occur within places subsequently influence mediated participation such that mediation is inter-threaded to various degrees. Given that emplacement works in multiple directions, the chapter analyzes the process of how such experiences become intertwined.
Meet-ups emerging from internet interaction have been observed and analyzed in numerous early internet studies since at least the mid-1980s. Studies include those by social studies of science scholar Sherry Turkle, communication studies scholar Howard Rheingold, new media and communication studies scholar Nancy Baym, sociologist Lori Kendall, internet studies scholar Annette Markham, and linguist Lynn Cherny, among many others.10 These studies largely disturbed notions of an online-offline binary, given participants’ in-person sociality and multi-threaded interaction. Interviewees in the present study often described how previous behavior in their mediated ecologies influenced their YouTube participation. For example, an interviewee whom I spoke with in Philadelphia organized a YouTube gathering because he had enjoyed similar meet-ups with ham radio enthusiasts years earlier. Such patterns of meeting through media and then gathering while still retaining the connotations of a mediated milieu is a phenomenon that repeats over time and across different media and mediated groups.
The internet and underlying communication networks do not operate above or separately from the physical structures that exist in particular places to make them work. The notion of “cyberspace,” once conceived as amaterial and aspatial,11 is influenced by internet networks’ material configurations, spatial situatedness, and local cultural factors. Research on internet cafés around the world shows that people and technologies in specific places greatly influence what constitutes “the internet” for individuals.12 Even people sitting at a computer interact in embodied and emplaced ways, given that access differs according to people’s locations. YouTube and associated mediated interactions are similarly spatially influenced.
Places are constituted from “meshworks”13 that include the physical and communicative infrastructures that facilitate interaction. Drawing on their research on internet ethnography, anthropologist Daniel Miller and sociologist Don Slater observed that “the Internet as a meaningful phenomenon only exists in particular places.”14 Anyone who has suddenly lost mobile phone or internet coverage when traveling from one place to another has viscerally experienced emplacement’s fluidity. Emplacement also occurs as networks efficiently hand off signals across distances, thereby providing smooth coverage. Emplacement may not be overtly visible when communications networks function well, but it is occurring nonetheless. The YouTube case throws into relief how emplacement works and why studying emplacement makes an important contribution to understanding contemporary sociality.
Emplacement dynamics have been studied in diverse ways (sometimes without necessarily referencing this term) in anthropological and ethnographic research. Researchers found that internet activity may influence perceptions of locational culture and interaction. For instance, groups of Inuit peoples have expressed cultural identity by creating web pages that perpetuate representations of their physical “remoteness.” Web pages and posted images create connotations of isolated places, while, ironically, the internet facilitates more intense connections with people in remote areas.15 In addition, techno-cultural representations of places such as digital, interactive maps assert the tangibility of groups such as place-oriented but physically displaced diaspora. Dispersed groups may retain images and other material artifacts of cherished home countries to keep their memories of places alive.16
A large-scale ethnographic project that addresses influences of place is the Why We Post study led by anthropologist Daniel Miller at University College London. This collaborative project significantly contributes to the anthropological record, drawing from the research of nine anthropologists who studied social media for fifteen months in locations around the world, including England, China, India, Turkey, Chile, Trinidad, Italy, and Brazil. Although the studies do not address YouTube, they offer the relevant argument that cultural groups located in different places use social media quite differently, such that digital media usage cannot be universalized. Their work constitutes a “plea for greater sensitivity to regional and social differences and their consequences.”17 In addition to studying usage in particular locations, the research also engages with dynamic effects of place on populations as they move. For example, researchers observed how Chinese migrant workers mentally envisioned a world beyond a grim existence involving low-paying industrial labor. Using social media, they created a sense of self that enabled them to connect with others and express their dreams for the future.
Each YouTube meet-up exhibited a particular character, in part based on the physical location in which it took place. YouTubers wished to intensify their interaction by meeting up. Yet they did not believe that networked interaction was not real. They deployed multiple interactive modes to express their sociality. Studying rhythms of mediated emplacement in particular places sheds analytical light on how multi-modal, inter-threaded interaction plays out in particular mediated contexts, as each meet-up exhibited unique as well as similar interactive characteristics.
Constructing Mediascapes
Video makers’ interactions produced a cross-modal concept of YouTube. During meet-ups, video played a central role as people recorded each other interacting and having fun. Just as the idea of “YouTube” permeated so-called offline interaction, so too did place-based offline interactions find their way back to the site through the meet-up videos that people recorded. Jill, an organizer of the New York City meet-up, astutely made a similar observation. Officially known as Jill Hanner, she also had a YouTube channel of the same name—her channel had previously been labeled xgobobeanx. Jill was a white woman in her early twenties who vlogged about various topics, including health, pets, dating, interviews with other YouTubers, and debriefs about YouTube meet-ups. Jill participated quite socially across several YouTube gatherings. However, as of 2018 her channel had changed direction and had focused more exclusively on health, fitness, and weight lifting. Jill’s videos typically saw 5,000 to 10,000 views each. As of June 2018, she boasted 27,688 subscribers.
Jill had been participating on YouTube for just over a year when she helped organize the groundbreaking gathering in New York City. It was a major achievement and attracted YouTubers from around the world. In her interview she insightfully observed that such gatherings offered the feeling of “taking [YouTubers] away from their computer but still having the computer,” which made the meet-up experience “really fun.” A concept of “YouTube” became temporally emplaced by being instantiated in physical places, thus eroding the boundaries of its status as an exclusively digital platform.
Rather than a binary online-offline characterization, this type of threaded interaction is more productively characterized as occurring within a “mediascape” of interactional forms. For anthropologist Arjun Appadurai, “mediascapes refer both to the distribution of the electronic capabilities to produce and disseminate information (newspapers, magazines, television stations, and film-production studios), which are now available to a growing number of private and public interests throughout the world, and to the images of the world created by these media”18 (emphasis original). In addition, mediascapes, “whether produced by private or state interests, tend to be image-centered, narrative-based accounts of strips of reality.”19 Under this rubric mediascapes are real and are a part of everyday life.
In a video entitled Talkin’ about OhCurt, which was posted on April 2, 2009, a YouTuber named anakin1814 (his YouTube channel name) illustrates how interaction traverses mediascapes. Anakin1814 details how he began interacting with fellow video maker OhCurt (his YouTube channel name), whom he says is the first real “internet friend” whom he met in person at a gathering in Minneapolis. Even as he depicts challenges to a strict online-offline binary through his own inter-threaded sociality, his use of terms such as “internet” friends who were “real” and whom he met in person demonstrates how difficult it still is for even leading-edge, heavy media users to move beyond online-offline binary conceptualizations. Anakin1814, a white man in his mid-thirties, vlogged on topics such as art, guilty pleasures, YouTube community, birthday greetings, the environment, and music. He had been on the site for about three years when he posted his video. Each of his videos garnered a few hundred views, with a few reaching a few thousand views. He had 2,490 subscribers as of June 2018.
Their interaction began when OhCurt responded to one of anakin1814’s videos. Anakin1814 in turn commented on one of OhCurt’s videos, which often revolved around humorous observations. OhCurt was a white man who opened his account in August 2007 and had 2,648 subscribers as of January 2009. His videos often discussed his opinions on life and views about YouTube culture. Due in part to a YouTube commenting glitch, they began chatting on other social media sites and sending long emails to each other. Anakin1814 mentions several times that OhCurt is an inspiration to him. All of these modalities together create a participatory mediascape that circulates images but also includes interactions that are conducted through media while influencing its creation.
Updating Appadurai’s concept for the digital realm requires analyzing how experiences traverse modalities and places. Anthropologist George Marcus offers several proposals for contemporary anthropological study, including following movements of people, things, and concepts that exhibit cultural salience.20 For example, YouTube sociality included interacting in person and through back channels such as direct messaging, emails, and video chat services such as Stickam.21
To study a mediated group, one must therefore trace interaction as it moves around a mediascape. For example, inter-threaded content from YouTube videos appeared in a Mentos and Coke demonstration at the New York City gathering. The activity echoed the viral videos that depicted people putting a Mentos mint candy in a Diet Coke bottle to create an explosion. The mint candy caused the Coke to gush upward in a fountain effect, making for dramatic visuals. Mentos and Coke videos were all over YouTube at the time of the gathering in 2007 and thus were associated with the site. At the gathering, the Mentos and Coke demonstration included lines of soda bottles poised to release explosions that people could watch and record. A concept of a “YouTube” activity became emplaced in the park where the meet-up occurred. The “star” in this case was not a person but a shared viewing activity that could be reenacted socially on a large scale in a specific location. The activity was distinctly YouTube-flavored, and the demonstration conceptually integrated YouTube and a New York City park in a single event.
Attending these events provided insight into the dynamics of emplacement and how interaction and participatory identity became inter-threaded and multi-modal. For example, videochick770 (her YouTube channel name), the organizer of the Ontario Science Centre meet-up, used a name that was itself an act of emplacement. It evoked the address of the science center where she worked, which was 770 Don Mills Road in Toronto. She and a few colleagues added this number to their YouTube channel names to create a connected subgroup on the site. Here the emplacement trajectory emerges from a geographical place to create mediated identities of a social group of creators within YouTube’s mediascape.
General media discourses often highlight conflict and fear of meeting in person. Casual searches in the news reveal that cyberbullying, stalking, and other meet-ups gone wrong provide temptingly provocative headlines. However, for all of the talk of online “stranger danger,” the reality is that contemporary sociality for many people with internet connection is commonly dispersed. People meeting at gatherings had already gotten to know each other through many different forms of interaction. Gatherings thus facilitated catching up with close friends, hanging out with acquaintances, and meeting new people. For YouTubers, meeting up often involved reuniting with people whom they had already encountered and interacted with amid a YouTube-inflected mediascape.
Emplacing YouTube
Emplacement dynamics reveal that when YouTube participants gathered together, their activities were influenced by the experiences they had on the site, their social and participatory goals, and the locations in which a meet-up occurred. Video makers’ embodied experiences constituted an emplaced concept of “YouTube.” Whether at their computers in their homes or at a meet-up making videos, people gathered together with other people and things in an “enmeshed” way.22
Each place of a meet-up became a “YouTube” place, at least as long as YouTubers hung out in that location or remembered their shared experiences there. A meet-up video that was posted by GeneticBlend (his YouTube channel name) on July 12, 2007, well illustrates this point. He was a white man in his mid-thirties who worked on a comedy pilot script with another YouTuber, bnessel1973. In his work GeneticBlend refers to bnessel1973 as “literally like a brother” to him. His videos suggest that he had worked in real estate but eventually became a holistic health counselor who wrote several books—such as The Definitive Way to Go Gluten Free (2012)—using his official name of Joe Rignola. GeneticBlend’s videos saw several thousand views, and as of June 2018 his subscriptions totaled 2,776. His videos included thoughtful vlogs on topics such as YouTube’s changes, YouTubers to check out, a description of a new camera, comedic compilations, health issues, and the challenges of vlogging.
Entitled NYC Gathering 777, GeneticBlend’s video was posted about ten months after he initially joined the site. The video is a compilation of events that took place at the meet-up in Washington Square Park in New York City. GeneticBlend explains how a place became infused with a concept of YouTubers gathered in the park. Gesturing across the meet-up in the video, he states, “This whole crowd is YouTube. Pretty much like half the park. We own half the park right now.” At a specific time and place, YouTubers “took over” the park and “owned” it for a while. The park became a “YouTube” place. GeneticBlend’s video invoked an idea of place-inflected sociality within YouTube’s interactive mediascape.
As predicted by scholars studying emplacement, meet-ups in different geographical areas exhibited varied activities and feeling tones—ones that were often commensurate with connotations about the physical place in which they occurred. For example, the event dubbed “SouthTube,” which occurred in Marietta, Georgia, invoked cultural tropes of the American South. The organizers of SouthTube emphasized southern hospitality in their choice of venue and in their democratizing motto, which was “SouthTube: Where Everybody Is Somebody.”
The name “SouthTube” also connoted a concept of the YouTube website—more specifically the social milieu of “YouTube.” The SouthTube event evoked cultural associations with interacting in southern milieus, such as hanging out in rocking chairs at the resort in ways that resemble leisurely hanging out on one’s own or a neighbor’s front porch (figure 3.1).
According to an organizer, the sites for the gathering were chosen because they were beautiful, casual, and would help people “to experience Southern hospitality at its finest.” While the night before the gathering was certainly a form of “partyville,” as one YouTube participant described it, the next day’s gathering at a park saw many families who brought their children to enjoy the barbecue (figure 3.2), thus showing the gatherings’ mixed-age aura. The organizers appeared to achieve their goal of offering warm social experiences in a laid-back atmosphere.
In addition to experiencing grassroots gatherings, I attended a commercial gathering called VidCon in 2016. YouTubers’ reactions to VidCon and similar events within the changing landscape of YouTube’s monetization trajectory are addressed in detail in chapter 7. This discussion references VidCon in terms of emplacement. Originally launched in 2010 by two vlogging brothers, Hank and John Green of the vlogbrothers YouTube channel, the event became an expanded commercial enterprise. In stark contrast to grassroots gatherings, VidCon’s ticket price structure hierarchically emplaced participation at the Anaheim Convention Center where it took place. The least expensive tier was the Community pass ($100),23 which provided access to a lottery to meet famous YouTube stars at meet-and-greet events. The second badge (which I purchased at the rate of $175) was the Creator pass, which permitted attendance to informational conference panels on subjects such as understanding viewing metrics, promoting social causes, dealing with critical comments, securing advertising deals, and working with industry partners. The expensive Industry pass ($500) provided access to additional events, panels, and social mixers that facilitated business arrangements, such as connecting video makers to appropriate commercial sponsors.
At VidCon, emplaced conference participation was hierarchically enforced. Security guards stood by the escalators, only permitting those with Creator and Industry badges onto the higher floors of the convention center for panels and private parties. At lunch a Community pass holder observed to me that those with Creator badges were lucky because they could go to the second floor, even just to explore. She understood participation spatially, in terms of where people with different levels of access could go. One place in which all attendees could mingle was the area between two lines of food trucks outside of the convention center (figure 3.3). Attendees could eat at picnic tables positioned between the trucks and dine with friends or meet new people with any type of pass.
In contrast, the grassroots gatherings were more fluid. Tickets were not sold; people interacted in more directly accessible ways. Indeed, places became video stars in their own right. YouTubers recorded themselves in front of historical monuments, works of art, parks, and even street corners. Meet-up footage often captured key highlights, events, and things that made an event geographically distinctive. For example, on our way to a meet-up in a park in Minneapolis, we noticed a statue of Mary Tyler Moore that commemorated her eponymous 1970s television show. Moore’s statue portrays the show’s main character, Mary Richards, a television newswoman in Minneapolis. Media nostalgia, including familiarity with old television shows, was a popular topic of conversation at YouTube dinners and social gatherings. Despite age, geographic origins, or socioeconomic class, many of us could readily bond by talking about media.
As we gazed at the statue commemorating the hopeful spirit of a television character, several of us recalled the show’s theme song, “Love Is All Around” (written and performed by Sonny Curtis). As the song played in the opening title sequence of the show, a montage depicted the character of Mary Richards arriving in her new neighborhood, excited about her new job in news media.24 At the end of the opening sequence, Mary Richards threw her hat into the air as a symbol of her positivity and exuberance. The hat toss in the original opening of the show has remained an iconic symbol of the optimism of its title character beginning a new job—notably in media. In 2002 a statue was placed in the area where the hat toss was filmed in Minneapolis. The statue honors the show and the character, who is reassured in the theme song that she will succeed.25
As a group of us passed by the statue on the way to the gathering, we paused to interact with it. A few people climbed onto the statue and hugged it, while others delightedly video-recorded these antics. One man threw his hat in the air, mimicking the optimistic act of the newswoman aiming to be a successful media professional. Soon we began belting out the lyrics to the Sonny Curtis tune. The song is about love and reassurance when starting something new, in this case within a mediated idiom. I found myself excited and swept up in the moment of singing a rather infectious and optimistic song that I have always liked with fellow YouTubers—who liked it too.
Many of us felt a participatory optimism about making media and sharing our voices on a broader scale, and the democratized aspects of meeting up underscored these feelings. Our pop culture nostalgia was initiated by interaction with objects in a particular place—which intertwined with our own hopes for the future. We had fun in a way that only a few of our friends and family would likely appreciate. Only a few people I know could recall the theme song to the old Mary Tyler Moore Show. (For the record, many of us forgot the words too.) The show’s message of mediated success and self-actualization resonated with YouTubers.
A place, such as a section of a street, an area of a public park, or a hotel lobby became emplaced as “YouTube places” for a time to those video makers who came together to socialize. YouTubers created YouTube places by interacting with combinations of people, things, and ideas that were simultaneously evocative of the place and of the interests of the people who gathered there. At times, intense feelings of bonding resulted from gathering in one place to celebrate the experience of making videos together.
Communitas on YouTube
YouTube’s emplaced activities offered inclusive and democratizing dynamics by inspiring a sense of collective togetherness. Although interviewees often spoke about the sense of community they experienced (see chapter 5), anthropologist Victor Turner’s concept of “communitas” arguably provides an insightful way to characterize the sociality that radiated through the emplaced gatherings within YouTube’s mediascape. Communitas refers to the deep camaraderie and social bonding that occurs during rituals or moments that feel out of time to people who may feel disparaged by society.26 Although Turner applied the term to feelings emerging during sacred and secular rituals, he also observed that marginalized social groups often displayed the characteristics of communitas. Examples included “beat” generations and “hippies” who exhibited communitas because they had difficulty accepting hierarchical social orders. Turner characterized communitas as “spontaneous” and “immediate,” emerging in ways that protest restrictive social orders.
Interviewees described feeling marginalized because of their video making and YouTube activities. Meet-ups provided a way for people to experience participatory validation. Close friends and family did not readily understand people’s need to make or watch YouTube videos, much less meet the people who made them. Such a position was publicly articulated at a gathering by Cory Williams, a white man in his mid-twenties. He was a public figure whose YouTube channel name was SMPFilms. He also went by the nickname “Mr. Safety.”
Cory was a very successful YouTuber and organizer of several meet-ups that he labeled “As One” gatherings, including two in Hollywood in 2007 and 2008 and two in San Francisco in the same years. At a small dinner for those of us who stuck around after the Hollywood event in 2008, Cory said that he considered As One as a brand that he worked hard to establish. At the gathering the security guards did not want us to film inside the mall at Hollywood and Highland streets, so people milled around on the public street in front of the mall to meet up.
At the time of his interview with me in Hollywood in 2008, Cory had been participating on the site for about three years. He was a very early YouTube adopter. Cory joined during the beta phase of the site in October 2005,27 just six months after YouTube’s first trial video, Me at the Zoo, was posted by YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim.28 Cory’s videos each received tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of views. As of June 2018, he had accrued 628,541 subscribers, which indicates a mass audience. His videos contained meet-up footage as well as comedic videos on topics aiming for widespread appeal, such as a rubber band stunt, a rap-based response to haters, pranks, and bathing in ramen noodles. Perhaps his most popular video is The Mean Kitty Song, which depicts him rapping and staging scenes that make his cute cat seem to act out in mean ways. This video received over 88 million views between its original posting in September of 2007 and June 2018.
Cory organized events that facilitated both sociality and self-promotion. He himself leveraged sociality quite astutely to gain visibility. He achieved early financial success on YouTube, reporting in 2008 that he was earning $17,000 to $20,000 per month on income from YouTube-related work. Half of his income from YouTube was reportedly generated from video advertisements, with the other half coming from sponsorships and product placements within video content.29 By 2016 he claimed to be earning roughly $100,000 per year.30
Several interviewees expressed skepticism about Cory’s true commitment to the YouTube community, given the intensive commercialization of his YouTube work and the way he leveraged sociality for material success. Still, it was clear that Cory brought people together socially by organizing well-attended gatherings. Many of us who were interested in YouTube sociality benefited from his efforts.
At a meet-up that he helped organize in Hollywood, Cory made a clever speech and shared a personal vignette that was widely relatable to many of us, certainly stimulating feelings of communitas. He said he had told a friend about YouTube and tried to share the experiences of viewing and making videos. Sadly, he relates, his friend did not join in his enthusiasm. When Cory urged his friend to watch a cool YouTube video, his friend’s disappointing response was: “dude, whatever.” These outsider friends “walk away,” Cory stated, leaving a YouTuber to realize that most of their non-YouTube friends “just don’t get it.” During the gathering Cory emphasized that “today we get it,” meaning that YouTubers could bond in part through feelings of marginality and ostracization that they experienced when non-YouTube friends did not understand the site’s participatory appeal.
Feelings of bonding and communitas with other YouTubers became particularly visible during the Toronto meet-up. A group of us informally gathered around a piano in a hotel lobby and sang popular songs in a way that communally emplaced YouTube experiences with other people who shared similar cultural knowledge and emotions (figure 3.4). In some ways hanging out in the lobby made it easier to socialize than it was to interact at the larger gathering the next day at the Science Centre. The actual gathering was filled with stimuli, including many attendees and exhibits to see and experience. The hotel lobby gathering was more casual. People filtered in slowly after attending a pre-party at the center. The energy and positive spirit mounted as YouTubers played the piano, drank, and sang songs.
According to Turner, communitas was often a temporary dynamic. After events ended, marginalized people returned to normal life and became reabsorbed into the structures they had challenged. What makes such spontaneous events (bitter)sweet is perhaps the knowledge that they ultimately must end as people return home to the status quo where it might be difficult to be “heard” amid the critical voices that crowd them out. Still, YouTubers maintained their relationships over time. Even if acceptance back home was slow to arrive or never materialized, memories were preserved through videos that recorded a concept of YouTubers’ communitas, which video makers repeatedly experienced over time and across media.
Going to the Reunion
Characterizing YouTube gatherings as “reunions” exhibited another important way that video makers reiterated their commitment to democratized media making. YouTube gatherings and reunions exhibited similar cyclical, rhythmic practices and diverse connotations. A reunion is an interesting characterization for YouTubers to make because it connotes the idea of reuniting with people known from prior interactions who have specific things in common. In US society, reunions are often motivated by experiences such as having attended the same club, college, or high school.
YouTube gatherings—like US high school reunions—were marked by diversity. Even as they united people with a shared interest in making videos, they also brought together a kaleidoscope of people with other interests and diverse demographics. Several interviewees talked about the wide variety of people whom they met and learned from by participating on YouTube. One video maker observed that at gatherings one sees a “cross-section of society, that goes from race, creed, religion, sexual orientation, you name it.” Scholars of high school reunions state that such events connect groups of people with different backgrounds, interests, and careers, thus resembling a “society in miniature.”31 Part of the reason for reunion diversity is that public high schools in the United States are among the few places, scholars argue, where people of different socioeconomic backgrounds are placed in the same setting. High school reunions are thus characterized by people gathering around a specific variable, much the way YouTubers from very different backgrounds united around video-making interests.
YouTubers referenced diversity and inclusiveness in shaping the parameters of an emplaced gathering. Marty, a white woman in her forties from the South, organized the SouthTube meet-up that I attended. She explained the origins of the event’s motto, which was, as mentioned earlier, “SouthTube: Where Everybody Is Somebody.” Although Marty has since deleted her YouTube account, at the time of her interview she had made social connections on YouTube and told me that the gathering started with a few local YouTubers talking about having a “weenie roast” and that attendance mushroomed to include hundreds of people. As excitement grew for the gathering, people realized that it would include diverse YouTube participants, from newcomers to celebrities. In response to this diverse mix, Marty developed the gathering’s slogan. She stated:
When we started realizing that everybody was coming, there were people that did not have videos, there were people that were new to YouTube that were coming, there were celebrities via YouTube that were arriving, and there was a little bit of concern that people who may not have any videos or nobody knew them, that they may not want to participate because they thought it might be focused on a celebrity event, and I started thinking, “You know, this is going to be an event where everybody is somebody!” You know, it doesn’t matter if you don’t have videos or if you have hundreds of videos or if you have no subscribers or you have 10,000 subscribers. So it was just kind of an epiphany one day. I just did “SouthTube: Where Everybody Is Somebody.”
Marty firmly believed, as did many interviewees, that all YouTubers—whatever their video-making status—were equally welcome at a gathering. Events at SouthTube sometimes included activities that resembled those at school or workplace reunions. For example, when many of us arrived at the resort, we participated in an organized “break the ice” game in which we had to find other attendees from YouTube who were on our list. Of course, high schools have cliques, and it was evident that smaller groups were gathering privately behind the scenes as well.
A YouTuber named ItalianStallionette (her YouTube name) organized a San Diego meet-up that she playfully dubbed “Best Tube.” In her interview she stated that she wanted the gathering to feel “more like a reunion” rather than “advertising people.” She aimed to set a warmer, more interpersonal tone than that which encouraged heavy self-promotion—and by extension, hierarchies of popularity. ItalianStallionette was a white woman who lived on the East Coast and had been on the site for about a year and a half when I interviewed her in San Diego. Her videos were often humorous or thoughtful vlogs that each received thousands of views (her subscriber count is unlisted). In one video she describes the famous “Christmas Truce,” which was an unofficial ceasefire in World War I in which soldiers sang Christmas carols.32
ItalianStallionette appeared to achieve her vision of creating a casual, social event. The San Diego meet-up was attended by perhaps a few dozen people. Attendees made vlogs and took photographs of each other, much the way one does when attending a reunion and seeing old friends. As I traveled through the crowd with my camera, I both co-created the emplaced event and experienced it. People waved, mugged for the camera, and interacted with me much as one would in home movies of the past. The photograph in figure 3.5 is representative of the reunion-type photos that were taken at the San Diego meet-up as well as other gatherings.
For most readers, such a photo merely adds documentary proof that I, as an anthropologist, attended the events I describe. For attendees, the photograph takes on quite a different emotional and temporal patina, as it brings to mind a larger field of social interactions and experiences across time. Film theorist Vivian Sobchack provides an insightful conceptualization of three nuanced readings of visual materials. She draws on the phenomenological philosophies of Jean-Pierre Meunier to frame her analysis.33 Phenomenology is the “study of human experience and of the ways things present themselves to us in and through such experience.”34 According to Sobchack, as spectators we experience the people and things in narrative fiction films as “irreal” because they are characters in a story; we know about them only through specific media. The next level is that of the documentary genre, for which people accept the reality of events as things that have occurred or could conceivably occur at other times and places. These people and events are accepted as not present but as real, even though viewers did not personally experience them. For readers of this book, the photo constitutes visual documentary, as most readers will accept that this image depicts events that occurred during my study of YouTube. However, most readers will likely feel emotionally distant from the people in the image.
According to Sobchack, on the opposite end of the spectrum from the fiction film is the “film-souvenir” or home movie, in which viewers know the filmic subjects and interpretively bring to the image much more information than that contained within a single photograph or video. Readers who experience this image as a “photo-souvenir” (to adapt Sobchack’s phrase) see “through” the image across time. Rather than seeing only the things depicted in the photo itself, participants recall many other visual and associated sensorial memories. Looking at the photo, I remember how we interacted together at other gatherings and on YouTube.
Ethnographers who feel similarly warm feelings toward their interviewees gaze on such images and experience them not just as a documentary of a single moment in time but rather as visual souvenirs of connected events. We see “through” these images to many other times, places, and emotions. In looking at this photograph, I remember not just the sociality of that afternoon but also the times I interviewed particular YouTubers and hung out with them at other gatherings over time. For example, after the San Diego meet-up, many of us went out for a delicious Mexican dinner. The photo helps me recall meeting some YouTubers for the first time at that dinner as well as connecting with others whom I had met before. Meeting up felt like a socially welcoming, democratized reunion for those who had interacted within the YouTube mediascape.
Chronotopic Interaction
The concept of the “chronotope” well illustrates how YouTube’s mediascape framed interaction. According to philosopher and semiotician Mikhail Bakhtin, chronotopes combine ideas of time and place to reveal cultural and interactional meanings.35 Originally used to study literary conventions in novels, the chronotope concept has been widely extended to other studies to analyze subtle cultural and interactive variation, particularly of dynamics that are not easily visible.36 Bakhtin used the example of a “threshold” to illustrate this concept. A threshold is a chronotope because it connotes the place between the inside and outside of a house. Simultaneously, it also refers to the moment in time that lies between the past (when one was outside of the house) and the future (when one will arrive inside the house). In common parlance, being on the “threshold” of doing something new may produce feelings of personal and cultural significance. An example is found in the ritual of a groom crossing a threshold with a bride. This is a momentous occasion because they are metaphorically starting a new life together and experiencing a major change in their status.
Chronotopes contain “inseparable” spatial and temporal dimensions that are “always colored by emotions and values.”37 On YouTube, chronotopic emplacement moved beyond individuals’ experiences and helped reify a collective temporal history through co-participation in events that people experienced together at the same time. Simultaneously “shared happenings” are crucial building blocks of sociality.38 Whether or not viewers attended gatherings, they could still experience them through videos and interactive comments.
Gatherings functioned as collective chronotopes because they collapsed time-space concepts that were interpersonally, culturally, and historically meaningful to video makers who co-created YouTube history. Chronotopic aspects of place were evident in the naming of many gatherings. Meet-up names often echoed attributes and cultural connotations of a gathering’s physical place. For example, the Midwest Gathering, which I attended in Minneapolis, directly refers to the larger geographic area in which the gathering occurred. It broadly invites a larger crowd from the “Midwest” to attend.
Human sociality is rhythmic, given that it marks annual, spatiotemporal experiences such as reunions, anniversaries, and birthdays. It was thus not surprising to see several meet-up videos that depicted activities at multiple SouthTube gatherings. A search for the term “SouthTube” identified videos that depicted yearly SouthTube gatherings between 2007 and 2012. Meet-ups exhibited a chronotopic cyclicality that culturally anchored interactions across time.
When meet-ups are chronotopically instantiated, time “thickens, takes on flesh, [and] becomes artistically visible,” Bakhtin wrote, while simultaneously “space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history.”39 Names sometimes echoed cultural resonances with the city in which the gathering took place. For example, the name of the Philadelphia gathering that I attended was called “Yo’ Tube,” a phrase that recalls the famous Rocky films that were set in that city. The films’ title character is a boxer named Rocky who calls out to his girlfriend and eventual wife with the famous line, “Yo, Adrian!” The name “Yo’ Tube” thus humorously connects a cultural homage to an emplaced YouTube gathering.
One memorable promotional video, which was posted on March 1, 2008, was entitled The 2008 Philadelphia YouTube Gathering. It aimed to raise enthusiasm for the Philadelphia meet-up. The video depicts images associated with the city, including scenes, people, and locations from American history, entertainment, food, and sports. A soundtrack pipes out the pulsing theme song of the Rocky films. Connotations of “Philadelphia” in the video spur YouTubers’ anticipatory excitement to participate. For instance, one commenter stated, “Whoo-hoo Philadelphia! Attending is on my to-do list. This is a very well-done promo—congratulations.” In the video a title card boasts that hundreds of YouTubers with video cameras will gather, “for the greatest collaborative historical documentation the World has ever seen.” This amusingly hyperbolic claim implies that the gathering’s events will yield both “collaborative” and temporally significant documents in YouTubers’ social trajectories. These ideals echo the characteristics of Philadelphia as a richly historical—and ostensibly democratized—US city.
For certain gatherings, YouTube place-based meet-up names overtly included a temporal component. Playful numerology characterized (and helped attendees remember!) forthcoming dates. Examples include 777 (the early, large-scale meet-up that took place in Washington Square Park in New York City on July 7, 2007) and 888 (a meet-up held on August 8–9, 2008, in Toronto). The Midwest Gathering in Minneapolis occurred on June 7, 2008, which is represented as 6-7-8 when written numerically. The Santa Monica gathering that I attended occurred on August 8, 2009, exactly one year after the large-scale 888 meeting in Toronto.
Philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre referred to collective rhythms as “public” rhythms.40 Calendars, ceremonies, and celebrations marked by time serve as social rhythms that coordinate interaction. Clever chronotopic nomenclature was especially important as YouTube was a new site, without specific dates to anchor its history to sociality. The meet-up names helped craft important, shared historical moments that intertwined individual YouTubers’ histories with those of YouTube.
Chronotopes emotionally framed interaction through references to cities, events, and shared histories as seen in the Yo’ Tube gathering, or they could evince a personal tone, as happened for ItalianStallionette. She organized a meet-up to celebrate her survival after having a kidney transplant in San Diego three years earlier. The meet-up served as a commemorative and very personal chronotope because it spatiotemporally associated her operation with the time and place of a YouTube meet-up. During an interview I asked her why she organized the gathering.
ItalianStallionette: Three years ago I received my second kidney transplant, and it’s the anniversary of it, and [I had] my kidney transplant in San Diego, so I live out on the East Coast, so I wanted to come back and celebrate, the past three years and that I’m still here!
Patricia: Wow! I wasn’t anticipating that.
ItalianStallionette: (laughs) Yeah.
Patricia: Um, it seems like you’ve gotten some pretty positive reaction to putting it on.
ItalianStallionette: I hope so, I mean when I did it, I’ve been to other gatherings, but I wanted this one to be [more like] a reunion, not advertising people, just to play and get along. ’Cause that’s really what it’s all about. So I thought that’d be kind of fun. Yeah, I’m happy. Everybody seems happy and relaxed. I like that.
For ItalianStallionette, the San Diego gathering became a chronotopic emplacement of significant life events. The gathering marked the time and place of her personal healing. It was also positively associated with YouTube sociality. ItalianStallionette chose an area far away from where she lived, but one that had personal, spatiotemporal meaning. ItallianStallionette’s choice of venue demonstrates how powerful chronotopic time-place associations can be and suggests why she might be sensitive to ensuring that the gathering had a social rather than overly self-promotional vibe.
Organizers created YouTube events that yielded strong associations of equality, accessibility, sociality, and sometimes even healing as they sought to socialize with like-minded YouTubers. Each gathering exhibited similar social interactions, yet they varied in feeling tone with regard to their location, time, and style. YouTubers’ values, such as exhibiting a welcoming and collaborative spirit, were reproduced through specific chronotopes of gatherings, which associated ideas about place with accessible sociality.41 Each act of emplacement accomplished important work by establishing sets of connected points along a historical chain that intertwined video makers’ personal trajectories with YouTube’s interactive timeline.
Chronotopic Chains of Sociality
Shared histories are important for building relationship continuity and outlining the parameters of social groups. But how are such dynamics accomplished in new mediascapes? Building on Bakhtin’s theories, this chapter proposes the concept of chronotopic chains of sociality, in which chronotopes are linked together in ways that provide important cultural resonances over time. For YouTubers, chronotopic chains resulted from experiencing a cyclical pattern of gatherings. Chronotopic chains are significant because each new gathering received participatory energy in part through its connection to prior socially inspired chronotopes along the chain. In the absence of historical trajectories that are typically constructed from public events such as political conflicts in nation-states, chronotopic meet-ups oriented interactants into the mediascape of YouTube.
Chronotopic chains perpetuate the notion of a coherent, regenerating social group. One such chronotopic link appeared in a video entitled Experience: As One Gathering, which was posted on March 14, 2008, by NorCalCorsello (his YouTube channel name). NorCalCorsello was a white man in his mid-thirties whose work focused on comedic videos and vlogs on serious issues of the day, such as transparency in government, high-speed train proposals, globalization, bridge suicide barriers, bike lanes, and border patrol. He also posted videos that experimented with form, such as one on “reality TV” in which his image appears on a large-screen television in a friend’s living room as they provide running commentary on it. His videos each receive a few hundred to a thousand views. As of June 2018, he had 619 subscribers.
NorCalCorsello organizes his meet-up video around his reflections of a San Francisco gathering. He and another YouTuber, kenrg (his YouTube channel name), reenacted a shot that they had executed together at the San Francisco gathering a year earlier. NorCalCorsello had been participating for a year and four months when he posted this video. Kenrg had been on YouTube for about a year and a half when they recorded their reenactment. Kenrg was a white man in his late forties whose videos included vlogs on topics such as the meaning of Thanksgiving, information about himself, opinions about fair use, equal rights, songs, movie parodies, and footage of gatherings he had attended. His videos each received several hundred to a thousand or even a few thousand views. As of June 2018, he had 4,122 subscribers.
NorCalCorsello begins his video by saying that when he attended the YouTube gathering in San Francisco in 2007, he did not know many people, even famous YouTubers. He relates how he spent much of his time gathering names of channels and subscribing to them upon his return home. Enacting the inter-threaded aspect of meet-ups, he kept up with these channels and their videos so that when he attended the San Francisco meet-up one year later in 2008, he was more familiar with YouTubers and their work. His video is structured such that he cuts back and forth from images of his footage from the event to his current post-meet-up reflections as he narrates them while facing the camera.
About halfway through the video, NorCalCorsello says he was excited to see kenrg, whom he had met one year earlier. The image cuts to footage taken at the event. In this sequence NorCalCorsello trains his camera on kenrg, who recalls, “This is what we did last year.” NorCalCorsello moves closer to him so that they appear on camera together to more closely emulate the shot they had taken one year prior. Kenrg states that they will “recreate the same shot from last year.” They recreate the shot with one exception: they both noted that instead of having the same model of camera, they have each upgraded to a new one. They reenact a common type of selfie video in which they are both in the frames of each other’s footage.
NorCalCorsello and kenrg bond through their shared recollection of their interaction as it was being mediated. This moment of interaction was fundamentally constituted through a mediated act. Temporally speaking, they were repeating a “shared happening”42 that occurred at the current event as well as a past one. The recreation was chronotopic in that it collapsed the time and place of a meet-up at a pier in San Francisco. The reenactment is a chronotopic link because it connects two different meet-ups over the period of a year. Their reenactment was thus a creative way in which a chronotopic chain of sociality not only tied together an act of recording together but also solidified emotional ties through a collaborative, mediated act of remembering.
Temporality as an Orienting Frame of Sociality
YouTubers’ videos provide a crucial line of evidence that demonstrates the inter-threaded character of meeting up in video makers’ social constellations. They also show how chronotopic frameworks created YouTubers’ shared histories. The first meet-up video that I encountered was entitled Renetto + Boh3m3 = YouTube History 101, which was reposted on July 16, 2015. The text description notes that it was originally uploaded around September 22, 2006. Notably, the video is depicted as “History 101,” which symbolically characterizes it as an early, culturally significant moment in YouTube’s interactive timeline. The video depicts two video-blogging stars known by their YouTube channel names of renetto and boh3m3 (pronounced bo-heem), who were early members of the YouTube partner program. Boh3m3 says in the video that his name is a reference to his interest in art and to the “Bohemian art revolution in Paris”—and, I would add, also references an unconventional lifestyle. Note the 3s serving as backward Es, an identity marker initially associated with elite computer geek speech and later with geek emulators.43
Renetto and boh3m3 informally met and video-recorded their encounter as they passed through an airport. It was fascinating to see them take the trouble to meet in this impromptu way. Both were very popular and outspoken vlogging personalities from the United States. As early adopters, they both joined YouTube in March 2006, about six months prior to their meet-up video. Renetto (officially known as Paul Robinett) was a white, forty-year old man who reportedly owned a candle shop. His videos each regularly garnered thousands of views. He had 38,596 subscribers as of June 2018. Boh3m3 (officially known as Ben Going) was a white man in his early twenties who had quit his job as a waiter at the time of the video. As of July 2018, his videos had earned thousands of views each, and he had 27,874 subscribers.
Renetto and boh3m3 enjoyed vlogging about their observations of YouTube. In the video renetto interviews boh3m3, inviting him to reveal inside information about himself. They chat, discuss aspects of YouTube participation, compare their teeth and types of baldness, and discuss boh3m3’s film idea. Having just met, they say they will not hug as they part, but they conclude with a friendly handshake and boh3m3’s comic impression of renetto’s odd, squeaky-voiced persona from YouTube (which in boh3m3’s voice sounds more like actor Adam Sandler). Their historical video demonstrated early on that YouTube sociality could not be contained online and that it was important to record meet-up events and post them on YouTube for others to enjoy.
Meet-up videos are now an important YouTube genre, as most video makers tend to record their activities when gathering in person. Many of the videos focus on noncelebrities—demonstrating how gatherings evidenced a democratized tone. In terms of the corpus of fifty meet-up videos drawn for this analysis, thirty-five, or 70 percent, contained images of people just hanging out. Some videos do not incorporate natural sound but simply depict images of people talking while an added music soundtrack plays. Fourteen, or 28 percent, of the videos mentioned specific benefits of meeting up, such as having fun, learning about the work of YouTubers whom they had not yet watched, enjoying specific moments (such as watching a funny chef during a restaurant dinner), meeting people “in the flesh,” and networking. Six videos, or 12 percent, of the corpus referenced difficulties in meeting up, including having car trouble, enduring bad weather, incurring too much expense, and dealing with awkward timing (such as attending while dealing with personal family tragedies).
The videos exhibited similar mediated and temporal trajectories that were cyclically repeated across events. Typically, meet-ups originated with videos advertising them. Pre-meet-up videos (seven videos, or 14 percent, of the corpus) aimed to whip up support and help disseminate logistical information. During the gathering people recorded videos of the event and their interactions (thirty-five videos, or 70 percent). Video creators found it pleasurable to interact through video, with people sometimes interviewing each other on camera. Videos also appeared that offered reflective thoughts after attendees returned home (eight videos, or 16 percent). Videos recorded at gatherings helped those who were unable to attend to partially experience them and helped those who attended to remember their experiences.
Temporally speaking, most videos (70 percent) in the corpus exhibited a “presentist” focus in that the videos concentrated on recording events as they occurred. The videos’ presentist energy illustrates the importance of recording moments and taking advantage of video-blogging modalities as a crucial aspect of participation. This finding disturbs the online-offline binary by suggesting that people did not attend a gathering to seek a supposedly pure, unmediated space. Meeting up included recording and sharing representations of interaction, thus showing how sociality was interwoven in mediated ways within YouTube’s larger mediascape.
In post-event reflection videos, video makers vlogged about their observations or analyses of events. These reflections usually included expressing enthusiasm for the event and a wish to attend future gatherings, thus establishing a chronotopic chain of desire for meeting up. Despite the popular press stereotype that emphasizes YouTube’s wacky viral fare, thoughtful video blogs in the sample also depicted video makers intelligently reflecting on and making sense of events they had experienced.
An introspective video on meet-ups was posted on August 12, 2008, by musoSF (his YouTube channel name), who converses with his friend anakin1814 (his YouTube channel name). MusoSF was a white man from San Francisco whose love for music was clear. His videos were often vlogs in which he sang songs or offered musical birthday greetings. He also vlogged about serious topics such as reflections on YouTube and gay marriage. In a nostalgic video about growing up in the 1970s, he expresses an urge to bring back the word “dynamite.” His videos see hundreds of views each, with a few earning several thousand views. As of June 2018, he had 1,722 subscribers. At the time of their video, musoSF and anakin1814 had both been participating on YouTube for about two years.
Entitled Pillow Talk 1: 888 Toronto Meet-up, this video was the first of a multipart series of videos posted alternately on each of their channels. It was filmed while musoSF and anakin1814 sat in a bed after the event was over. They said that many of the most interesting conversations at the Toronto gathering happened at night as people chatted and hung out in their hotel rooms. Given that they enjoyed social experiences, they expressed frustration over video makers who played up their celebrity. The choice of setting for their retrospective reflection suggested that it was socially inappropriate to wield a camera in a slumber party atmosphere while such quiet, private gatherings were occurring. Still, they felt it important to recreate key events by mimicking what it feels like to gather behind the scenes and talk quietly with other YouTubers during a crowded meet-up.
The Pillow Talk video illustrates how emplacement includes subtle interactions beyond the umbrella idea of gathering in a single “place.” Hotel lobbies and shared hotel suites where people socialized were neither completely public nor private. On one level their interaction in shared hotel rooms was relatively more public than when each YouTuber was alone, completely away from other video makers. On the other hand, they were relatively more private than when they hung out with hundreds of other YouTubers in a public park. These details illustrate nuanced dynamics of emplacement in which the public and private do not function as a rigid binary. Rather, they are more productively understood as a fractal relation that splinters off to smaller and smaller (as well as larger and larger) interactional units that nevertheless retain a comparative sense of public and private social activity.44
Thirty-three, or 66 percent, of the videos contained modest footage of friends talking or experiencing relaxed forms of hanging out. These images echo what anthropologist Richard Chalfen labeled “home mode” images, which are photographs and home movies that focus on interpersonal relationships and themes. Excluding advanced amateurs from his study of US media making in the 1960s-1970s, Chalfen found that home mode media exhibited content and aesthetics that were distinct from other genres such as educational or feature films.45 Home mode media were created for the viewership of private individuals, such as family members. Scholars often dismiss home mode footage as banal. It is often criticized for reinforcing capitalist, patriarchal family hierarchies, such as when fathers film a new family car or record their children opening expensive holiday gifts.46 Mediated acts in past eras put males in control of family images and reinforced the father figure as the successful head of the household.
In contrast, media and communication scholar Maria Pini found that contemporary home mode footage exhibits important functions for creating social unity, continuity, and stability among family members who are separated by time and space.47 Comments posted to YouTube meet-up videos suggest that such videos enable viewers to “re-embody that place and time, and return to that moment” of shared experience.48 In addition, home mode video has now broadened to include not only biological families but “families we choose.”49 Videos that solidify relationships now appear across a broad social landscape, including people from work, neighborhoods, clubs, and many other social configurations.50
Examining commentary posted to the meet-up videos in the corpus reveals how YouTube sociality became emplaced and created shared temporal histories. If commenters had attended the meet-ups, their posts emphasized how the footage brought back memories, thus evoking new conceptions of home mode media that aim to close the temporal and spatial distances between their attendance at a gathering and their subsequent memories.51 On a post to a San Diego meet-up video, one commenter stated: “Good to meet [you]—it’s so fun to relive the day through your clips. Hopefully we’ll do another one of these at some point.” This commenter introduces a chronotopic desire for future meetings. YouTubers also emotionally connected to events, as one commenter stated in response to a video posted about a New York City meet-up: “awesome video man. wow tears up. i miss it so much. i was in this video 4 times hehe yay. look for the bright yellow jersey hehe.” The commenter injects visibility for himself but also emphasizes how much he misses gathering with YouTube participants.
Temporally speaking, a significant proportion (34 percent) of the videos referenced chronotopic orientations, such as anticipating attending a meet-up the next year or remembering or comparing it to prior meet-ups. Even if they had recorded meet-up footage, YouTubers expressed appreciation for seeing the event from another video maker’s point of view. These findings illustrate how YouTubers interested in sociality invited increased, more democratized participation, as multiple points of view were valued. For example, a commenter to a Philadelphia meet-up video notes that they intend to post their footage of the event. The video maker replies: “Can’t wait to see the events from your camera’s point of view. Was great meeting you too! If Illuminatta and I ever get the Long Island gathering going you gotta come up for that.” The video maker expressed interest in appreciating other people’s renderings of events of the same meet-up and suggests a rendezvous on Long Island, thus creating chronotopic anticipation for future sociality.
If commenters had not attended a meet-up, they often expressed gratitude for being able to experience it through posted videos. For example, in response to GeneticBlend’s video NYC Gathering 777, a viewer whose channel name is bnessel1973 stated: “I’m so friggin jealous. That looked like an amazing time! Post all the stuff you got, PLEASE! I need to see all of what I missed. Look forward to meeting you face to face, brother.” The plea to post more videos simultaneously references a desire to experience the place-based, in-person event and emphasizes a desire to meet “face to face,” which all contribute to a larger, interwoven mediascape. Meet-up videos exhibited a vitality that even prompted some commenters to feel that they had experienced events vicariously. Posting to a video depicting a meet-up in Santa Monica, one commenter noted: “I have not been to a single one of them there gathering yet I feel like I have been to all of them. I’m tired. Lol.”
With cameras constantly recording and emplacing YouTube, notions of an online-offline binary are severely challenged. YouTubers used meet-up videos in ways that temporally and chronotopically framed their interaction, including anticipating getting together, enjoying collective mediated moments, and reflecting on past events to create anticipation for new cycles of meeting up. For some YouTubers, it was possible to keep the cycles going in person and through videos. Conversely, some YouTube participants encountered participatory frictions when trying to involve multiple modalities in the YouTube mediascape. Viewers did not need to attend gatherings to feel that they were part of YouTube sociality—but many felt deeply grateful if they could.
Participatory Fungibilities and Frictions
YouTube participants enjoyed—and indeed often maximized—multiple modalities within an interactive mediascape. The term “modality” connotes various characteristics across computer-mediated scholarship, but here it refers to alternative types of interpersonal interaction through specific sensory media.52 It is not analytically robust to limit the term “modality” to basic categories such as “online” versus “offline” behavior because numerous modalities are apparent within each type, and YouTubers traveled across them in nuanced ways. For example, YouTube offers several modalities, including the ability to post videos, offer text comments, and engage in direct messaging. It is beyond the scope of the study to examine all modalities on video-sharing platforms or all modalities available during a gathering. The point here is merely to note that modalities are multiple and that each one offers sensorial and participatory advantages for YouTubers seeking sociality.
Rather than engage in binaries, it is more productive to speak of degree of intensity and type of mediation across modalities. For anthropologists John Postill and Sarah Pink, intensities refer to the degree of sociality one exercises through media, such as ranging from executing a simple “like” on a Facebook page to engaging in person.53 The present study is concerned with how social behavior interacts with technical modalities; thus, intensities here refer to the amount of mediation one employs to achieve social ends. For example, a person who attends a meet-up and records only a few moments is exhibiting less mediated intensity than someone who carries the camera around at all times and tries to record as much as possible. An example might include recording many people at once, as depicted in figure 3.4. Recording a few choice moments exhibits a lower degree of intensity of mediation than recording as many as one can. Type of mediation refers to the device used (such as a smart phone camera versus a video recorder) and the modalities that are employed to interact (such as sending asynchronous video messages versus interacting through a synchronous, live video link).
This section proposes the concept of participatory fungibility to understand mediation’s role in video sociality. A quintessential example of a fungible item is money, which can be used interchangeably for different purposes. This section analyzes nuanced characteristics of mediated participation that appeared to be fungible across degree of intensity and type of mediation. It is also concerned with understanding which types of mediation encountered frictions. Although there are clearly many categories to discuss, this section will focus on emotional, experiential, and physical characteristics of mediated fungibility.
When YouTubers say that they feel connected to people whom they initially met on YouTube and wish to meet them in person, they are displaying emotional fungibility across mediated experience. Emotional fungibility means that relationships and feelings toward others may be felt as equally intense across different types of mediation. When attendees came to meet-ups excited to meet someone they knew from YouTube, they indicated that the feelings they held toward other creators exhibited similar depth, whether they bonded through types of media such as comments or videos or whether they met in person and made media throughout the meet-up together. Their depth of feeling resonated across different types of mediated interaction.
However, not all encounters were equally fungible for creators across different types of media modalities. For instance, interviewees described feeling dissatisfied with the YouTube platform’s asynchronous aspect and began seeking more “presentist” media, such as live video chats that enabled people to synchronously connect with YouTube friends. For these video makers, YouTube was not experientially fungible to other digital media that offered the presentist, synchronous focused that they desired.54 Experiential fungibility refers to whether people feel a sense of interchangeably equivalent sensory contact when using various types of mediation. In order to interact with their preferred type of sensory modality with other YouTubers, they left the site, at least for a time, to go onto a live chat service called Stickam. Although both sites are digitally mediated and exist within a YouTube mediascape, the activities were not, to these YouTubers, always experientially interchangeable.
Even though YouTubers articulated the belief that commenting was emotionally fungible to making videos in terms of how people felt connected to others, not all creators treated the two activities as experientially fungible. For example, if commenting and making videos were accepted as experientially fungible, why would YouTubers strongly encourage people to expand their participation from commenting to making their own videos? People often inspired others to expand their modalities of participation. Despite their idealistic rhetoric about equivalence, some YouTubers felt it important to encourage people at the margins to experience YouTube by sharing their own videos.
Sensorially speaking, YouTubers also referenced touch as an important quality available at in-person gatherings. For example, I interviewed DaleATL2 (his YouTube account name), a white man in his forties who stressed that meeting up offered sensory advantages, such as touch and smell, that were simply not present in digital environments. Receiving a few hundred to several thousands of views on each of his videos, he vlogged about places he visited with his family. He also posted comedic vlogs and movie parodies. He had been on the site for about a year and four months when I interviewed him at the SouthTube meet-up in 2007. As of June 2018, he had 2,404 subscribers. DaleATL2 told me that gatherings were important because they facilitated a range of senses:
I would equate it to the pen pals of old, but on steroids. Because no longer are you only communicating on paper, you’re communicating both visually and auditorially and you’ve got all the— except for the sense of smell, and touch, and that’s what the touch is for [gestures around toward the gathering], this is the touch and smell. You’re getting all the senses together.
DaleATL2 saw pen pal letter writing practices as similar but not experientially fungible to making videos because the latter offer visual and auditory sensory experience. In turn, he did not characterize video making as experientially fungible to gatherings because videos lack “touch” and “smell.” He appreciated the incorporation of “all the senses” in a way that enlivened his YouTube experience.
The sensuality of touch seemed to be an important part of the meet-up experience for numerous attendees as they interacted together. Indeed, footage recorded for my vlogs and my ethnographic film Hey Watch This! (2013) is filled with images of people hugging, shaking hands, and enjoying embodied connections with their fellow YouTubers in co-located places (figure 3.6).
Note that assessments about fungibility are ultimately personal. Some people might not feel experiential fungibility between video-mediated and in-person encounters due to specific characteristics (such as smell), which are not present in all modalities. Yet, degrees of fungibility must be examined in each case. It is possible to experience one type of fungibility but not necessarily all types. For example, just because one does not achieve experiential fungibility between videos and gatherings (because they cannot touch people in a video) does not mean that using media lacks emotional resonance to other video makers. In these cases they feel emotional but not experiential fungibility across different types of interactive modalities.
Conversely, for those YouTubers for whom touch is unimportant, they may actually accept videos and meet-ups as experientially fungible. In early internet decades it was often assumed that lack of certain sensory cues in digital media meant that people could not bond emotionally. But online participants and researchers quickly demonstrated that this is obviously not true. People may bond quite deeply over media.
In some cases experiential characteristics may be related. Some people may emotionally bond more easily, for instance, through experiential sense of touch. For other people, such as me, touch is not a particularly crucial requirement for bonding with friends. I am not a “hugger,” as they say. The ability to hug or smell someone is not necessarily part of my calculus for experiential fungibility, which demonstrates that despite binaries that smuggle in the ethical assessment that in-person interactions are always superior, in fact fungibilities cannot be determined in a universalized way across all people and contexts. Although it is beyond the scope of this project, future studies might investigate how different types of media fungibility may relate to and influence other forms. The goal here is simply to identify and analyze nuanced differences and how they challenge crude online-offline binaries. Mediation is imbricated in daily life, but it is important to remain sensitive to varied engagements with different mediated modalities.
A final dimension may be termed physical or mobile fungibility, which refers to how easily people are able to physically access types of interaction. A person who has no computer would find it difficult to interact in an exclusively mediated way. Indeed, physical access to the internet is not always easily achieved. Conversely, a person who cannot afford to attend a meet-up would not be able to physically meet others in person. A person who could just as easily interact with people through a computer as through travel to meet-ups would arguably be enjoying physical fungibility between media types. Such a person would no doubt have access to considerable resources. Lack of physical fungibility does not imply that mediated interaction lacks emotional fungibility. It is possible to feel emotional connections to people across media types without being able to access each modality equally. What is considered fungible varies across individuals and different modalities of participation.
Among YouTubers, participatory frictions occurred. It was not always possible to move seamlessly across different types of mediation. While recognizing that the internet represents a “way of life,” we must also acknowledge limitations and ruptures of access. Information studies and history scholar Paul Edwards coined the term “data friction” to examine how movement of data may be impeded. Writing in the context of global warming research, “data friction,” according to Edwards, “refers to the costs in time, energy, and attention required to collect, check, store, move, receive, and access data.”55 Whenever data move, friction influences and indeed may “impede” movement. In social systems, Edwards contends, frictions may include “conflict” or “disagreements.”
YouTubers cited numerous forms of friction that challenged their ability to physically attend meet-ups or to access mediated forms of interaction. For instance, some YouTubers did not save their video files and used the site as storage. When the corporate entity of YouTube deliberately or inadvertently deleted a video, their physical access to their own mediation was impeded or even destroyed if they lacked a backup. Losing one’s own videos exemplifies experiencing data friction—one that caused some YouTubers considerable distress. The videos were not physically fungible across their own personal computer as well as the public platform of YouTube.
Traveling to gatherings included many challenges such as family obligations, limited finances, getting time off work, shyness, and facing fears of meeting people initially known from the internet. For example, one woman I talked to, whom I refer to as Jane (a researcher-assigned pseudonym), said that it was not easy for her family to understand why she wanted to attend gatherings. Jane was a white woman and mother of young children who often vlogged about family moments such as a baby learning to walk and child haircuts. She also sent birthday greetings and recorded comedic skits. Her videos typically received a couple of hundred views each, although a few saw a thousand views. As of June 2018, she had 134 subscribers.
Jane had been participating on YouTube for nearly a year and a half when I interviewed her at the Toronto gathering in 2008. Jane’s family’s concerns reiterate common binary conceptualizations in discourse about networked interaction. She noted that as a returning student, it was also difficult to take time to attend gatherings. She stated:
My husband has slowly become more open to our going [to a gathering]. He came with me to Philly, um, and met some people and kind of became more comfortable with the idea of meeting up with “internet people.” So that’s only been a recent thing, so financially it’s not been an issue; it’s more been a social issue and a timing issue that only recently [I’ve] been able to do.
The friction Jane experienced involved social issues, specifically convincing her family that it was important for her to meet up with YouTube friends. The marginalization of YouTubers is exhibited in that, to members of Jane’s family, it was initially odd for her to meet up with them.
Paradigms of sociality collided when family members operating within an outdated online-offline binary could not understand why she might wish to socialize with people whom she initially encountered in a mediated way. Her family’s discomfort with her desire to meet up with “internet people” reflects a common suspicion of becoming close to those whom one originally met via the internet. For some people, the sequential aspect of meeting people in person first is an important part of a friendship trajectory. YouTubers did not share this temporal and sequential line of reasoning, which reflected a more contemporary acceptance of the inter-threadedness of mediated life. Although Jane did not have a problem with finances, she referenced time constraints as a returning student. Jane had to work through these social and temporal frictions to attend gatherings.
Many people whom I interviewed earned modest incomes in fields such as clerical work, grocery store inventory control, and temp work. It was not surprising that people experienced participatory frictions when traveling to gatherings. Most interviewees told me that they preferred attending meet-ups close to their home due to costs and travel time. As a California resident, I found it far easier to attend in-state meet-ups. Another YouTuber who lived in the Los Angeles area seemed to be going to the same California-based meet-ups that I was attending. Given his interest in YouTube sociality, it is perhaps not surprising that he appeared at meet-ups in Hollywood, San Francisco, San Diego, and Santa Monica—all of which are relatively accessible for California residents.
However, attending meet-ups was not easy for all YouTubers. At the meet-up in Toronto in 2008, I asked an interviewee named myloflex (his YouTube channel name) whether he found it “easy” to attend meet-ups in terms of finances and time off work. Myloflex was an Asian-Canadian man in his late twenties whose videos included experimental short films, cooking videos, videos about his health, and meet-up footage. The view counts on each of his videos are extremely varied, ranging from a few dozen to several thousand. As of June 2018, he had 320 subscribers. When I interviewed him in Toronto, he had been participating on the site for just over two years. In answer to whether it was easy to attend meet-ups, myloflex explained:
Not really. Honestly, um. The one in New York a year ago was—was very, very difficult. [The hotel], flight, um, here I’m a little more local, so it is easier, but getting the time off wasn’t easy. I had to work a lot of straight days to get this weekend off. And the drive is just, a commute’s a commute in Toronto, so.
He said that despite these difficulties he chose to come anyway because it was “fun” and because one could reconnect with people. He stated an interest in seeing them again “one year around,” thus referencing a desire for cyclical, chronotopic sociality—as seen in reunions. Like many attendees, he appreciated an ability to meet up with YouTube friends and to catch up on their lives. Myloflex’s story suggests the sacrifices that YouTubers were willing to make for sociality. Going to such lengths visibly demonstrated the personal importance of participating with other YouTubers.
Comments on videos posted after meet-ups also reiterated the difficulties of meeting up in person. In comments on a video posted about the Midwest Gathering in Minneapolis, commenters expressed regret that they could not attend but emphasized a desire to attend convenient meet-ups in the future. One commenter stated: “i wish i was there. if there is one in sf i will go.” Another commenter echoed these sentiments: “aww man, i got to wait for another NYC one cause i live in nyc.” Reacting to a video posted about the New York City meet-up, a commenter stated:
I would love to go to a YouTube gathering, but with the kids and finances it’s just not doable at this point in my life (unless there is ever one in MA ; ). Although I am afraid I would be really shy, as I am in real life. On the other hand, it would be so cool to get to hang out with other youtubers! This was a neat look into the past!
The commenter discusses how parenting responsibilities, finances, and social shyness complicate attendance at meet-ups but suggests that a local meet-up might be possible and that it would be desirable to meet other YouTubers interested in sociality.
Because meet-ups were difficult to attend, they were all the more important to YouTube participants. Mediation of different types and degrees of intensity are part of life for YouTubers in this socially inspired group. At the same time, it is important to recognize individuals’ asymmetrical, material affordances. Acknowledging these challenges and the financial and scheduling sacrifices that YouTubers made underscores the emotional depth that people in this social group expressed for one another. Although meeting up on YouTube may have felt emotionally fungible to meeting up and recording people in person, such occurrences were not necessarily experientially or physically fungible. Although it was not feasible to go to every meet-up that one wished to attend, YouTubers often expressed deep regret and sadness at not being able to go, and they articulated a chronotopic desire to do so when possible in the future.
When we examine forms of fungibility, it becomes clear that no single experience “defines” what it means to participate using a rubric known as YouTube. Video makers sought to engage with multiple modalities and degrees of mediation to interact with other YouTubers. YouTube as a concept inflected in-person interaction—people were attending a YouTube gathering, after all. The case study of socially motivated YouTubers shows that mediation of many types and degrees constituted the YouTube experience. What was crucial was keeping them open, accessible, and democratized in order to solidify co-created and collaborative sociality.
Temporal Emplacement
YouTube sociality reveals that binaries of online-offline conceptualizations are flawed. YouTubers used multiple types of modalities to interact, yet their modalities were deeply intertwined. During a gathering a place often became a YouTube place, as people recorded their activities with varying degrees of intensity. Studying emplacement and its orienting concepts of communitas, reunions, and chronotopes revealed YouTubers’ idealistic conception of its welcoming, collective, and inclusive atmosphere. People posted meet-up videos such that place framed YouTube participation. YouTubers planned, experienced, and remembered place-based interaction. Taking into account concepts of emotional, experiential, and physical fungibility, we see that YouTubers often made sacrifices in terms of time, finances, and social conflict to engage with other people from the site. Video makers expressed emotional fungibility in finding meaning from a variety of different types and degrees of mediated modalities.
No two YouTube experiences were exactly the same, but they all interwove modalities across time and space to create a larger aspiration to democratized sociality that suggests more of a mediascape rather than a single website. YouTubers engaged in personal and collective forms of chronotopic emplacement that revealed the importance of interacting and marking these events through media and across time. YouTube participants conceptually created chronotopic chains of interaction and anticipatory desire that deeply influenced video makers’ sociality as they temporally co-created a sense of shared history that brought them closer together. YouTube gatherings and their resulting videos emplaced interactivity by infusing feelings of past, present, and future mediated experiences that were at times inseparable.