5
What Defines a Community?
One of the first YouTubers I met was a white woman in her early forties whose YouTube channel name was ShortbusMooner. During her interview in the peaceful setting of a public park, she eloquently and staunchly described YouTube as a community—a cornerstone concept in anthropology. As she spoke, she gestured toward the meet-up we were attending in Marietta, Georgia, as proof that YouTubers formed a community. ShortbusMooner strongly believed that people cared about others and helped them in hard times. She recalled how YouTubers rallied around people who had been seriously ill and had campaigned to support them. She observed that if everyone was “anonymous and didn’t care about each other, then those things wouldn’t happen.” In one of her videos, ShortbusMooner argued that YouTube was not one community but many diverse communities, a position echoed by several interviewees.
Most meet-up interviewees—including those with varying levels of popularity on the site—felt that YouTube was a community, in part through shared interests such as social forms of video sharing. In contrast, YouTubers outside of the study held diverse views. Some commenters saw the site as merely a “platform” or a “business” that amounted to little more than an “opinion poll” or “marketing strategy.” These conflicting perspectives invite reflection on what constitutes community within commercialized milieus. For example, are YouTubers’ inventing new ideas about community or do their conceptualizations resemble those in the anthropological record? What is the function of community on YouTube? How does it work and what are its limitations? What are its temporal dimensions? What are the characteristics people use to determine whether a community has formed?
In terms of the Lefebvrian mode of analysis, this chapter examines how people reach a “peak” of sociality such that they believe that YouTube functions as a community, or may become one under the right circumstances. The previous chapters discussed growth phases of social intensification that for some YouTube participants supported traditional notions of the community concept. In temporal terms, an important aspect of building community includes experiencing shared happenings—often through media—that occur contemporaneously. For example, videos that appear on the first page of YouTube could help viewers share cultural content and promote a sense of togetherness.
Lefebvre noted that rhythmic patterns might be linear or cyclical. On YouTube the development of sociality took both forms. Groups such as the one analyzed in this book experienced a linear trajectory that began by spending time together using various modes of interaction. They then strengthened social bonds through forms of reciprocity, formed a sense of community, and experienced eventual decline in intensity of interaction, as discussed in the next chapter. The community phenomenon exhibited a cyclical quality. As new groups arrived, their videos suggest that they too began interacting socially and exploring whether YouTube could function as a community within their social circles.
Clearly, not all YouTubers experienced the site as a community at the same time, with many people never seeing the site in this way. Lefebvre identified “arrhythmias” as multiple rhythms that conflict in discomforting ways. As YouTubers, interviewees took the time to build toward community while other YouTube participants were only beginning to understand its possibilities. Mass audiences engage with the site as a broadcast medium. For them, a tangible community will quite likely never materialize. Different paces of community acceptance resulted in participatory arrhythmias that yielded complications for its widespread uptake and arguably contributed to its eventual decline as a social milieu for the people studied in this book. The next chapter will explore the end of the Lefebvrian trajectory of YouTube participation that moved from birth/beginning, as marked by arrival to the site, to death/end, as people left, passed away, or decreased intensive participation.
In contrast to mass viewing audiences, most interviewees did feel emotionally close to others and felt that YouTube sociality exhibited important community dynamics. Since community formation through media is a sociological fact,1 I initially wondered why people kept revisiting this question in interviews with me and in their own videos. The answer lies partly in the term’s ambiguity and because, as this chapter argues, it is through discourse in videos, commentary, and ongoing collective participation that community is created and maintained.
As new media generations appear, they may not automatically consider themselves to be part of a community, so it is a process rather than a concrete category. It is unsurprising that so many digital ethnographies—especially those that deal with a new medium—inevitably include people’s reflections on the relevance of community for their social collective. Discussions of community cyclically recur across mediated groups that are attempting to make sense of their developing social formations. The chapter calls for retaining the conceptual rubric of community but not to secure a restricted and potentially elitist definition. It draws on an engagement with public anthropology to advocate retaining the idea of community as a proxy term for a collective project that involves online participants of different contributory levels to continually shape its social parameters.
The chapter opens with a discussion of the multiple lines of ethnographic evidence that were used to analyze perceptions of community. Next it revisits how the term has been conceptualized in the anthropological literature and in digital scholarship. The chapter then analyzes interviewees’ responses to questions about the meaning of community. Responses were compiled in a video entitled What Defines a Community?, which was posted as part of my open video field notes series on AnthroVlog. The chapter critically interrogates YouTubers’ notions of community in light of the anthropological record and its revisions.
The chapter then analyzes commentary from viewers who interpellated themselves into the study by posting comments to my video, which investigated numerous and nuanced parameters of community on YouTube. To interpellate the self into discourse means to identify oneself and one’s interests as subjects of the discussion.2 Far more interesting than their determination of YouTube’s community status were their criteria for assessment and the ways in which their interactivity with the video’s content and with other commenters provided clues about the feasibility of public engagements with anthropology. Standard reactions to diverse and sometimes hostile commentary often include faulting anonymity as the culprit. This chapter tackles this debate head-on by demonstrating that productive commentary largely came from YouTubers unknown to me. Foreclosing anonymous content thus threatens to preclude meaningful engagement in networked spaces. Such a finding suggests that dealing with anonymous others is important for sharing information and accomplishing civic goals. The chapter completes its examination of the ethnographic data by analyzing how YouTubers address community in their own videos, demonstrating that the topic of community continues to exhibit vitality—and controversy—among YouTubers.
Drawing on examples from prior projects as well as the present effort, the chapter addresses the question of whether public forms of anthropology can shed analytical light on theoretical concepts such as community. The answer is a qualified yes, as long as participatory expectations are well managed. Publics should be provided with adequate resources to contribute effectively, and parameters of interaction must be appropriately crafted.
The chapter concludes by engaging in a theoretical reflection on community that asserts that the term is best understood as processual rather than categorical. It is not yet time to dismiss the notion of community in anthropological and ethnographic research on media. Even if individual scholars choose to do so, it will emically reappear as new cycles of interaction are launched and discussed in new media. The concept should be retained and its processes of negotiation should be critically examined in each case. In considering community dynamics over time, it is clear that collaborative efforts will be required to determine whether specific instantiations and ideals of community may be collectively realized.
Analyzing Multiple Lines of Evidence
This chapter draws on three main lines of evidence to analyze community. The first source of evidence is a compilation of video-recorded interviews that I conducted at a SouthTube meet-up in Marietta, Georgia, in September 2007. The compilation video that I created and posted is called What Defines a Community? The second line of evidence is an analysis of a random sample of text comments that were posted to my compilation video as of June 2009. The third line of evidence involves analyzing representative case studies of videos that YouTubers made on the topic of community in 2014.
What Defines a Community? is a six-minute video consisting of video-recorded responses from seven out of a total of thirteen interviewees whom I spoke with at the gathering. We discussed many subjects, but the compilation video includes only remarks about community. The video principally argues that for many interviewees, YouTube fostered community. At the same time, their narratives contain fascinating and important nuances about community that echo diverse perspectives on its meaning in the scholarly record. A key aesthetic choice was to include only interview remarks rather than provide an expository voiceover by the researcher. A central goal of the video was to invite audiences to reflect on their own views of community by hearing the nuances and diversity in the narratives. Interview footage for the video was chosen as representative of the interviewees at the gathering and across the project. Interviewees’ criteria for adjudicating YouTube’s community status varied widely, ranging from patterns of consistent, mutual aid to inevitable drama and conflict. For interviewees, YouTube was more than just a website: it represented an outlook of acceptance and interactivity through video sharing.
The video intersperses interview footage (figure 5.1) with observational images of attendees hanging out, having a picnic, making videos of one another, and taking photographs (figure 5.2). The images depict the beautiful natural park that served as the setting for a technologically driven social group ranging from children to older people who gathered based on their shared interests in YouTube and video. On average, each video interview lasted about ten minutes. As YouTubers, we stayed close to the action; the noise of the meet-up is often heard in the background.
YouTube editors featured What Defines a Community? on the site’s welcome page for several days in early October 2007, where it garnered more than 1 million views and 1,906 comments. Editors likely selected my video because it was a popular topic on the site and because YouTube has historically highlighted self-referential material.3 My video’s featured status provided an opportunity to test how a video created within an anthropological framework with a group of YouTube enthusiasts might be received among a larger swath of heterogeneous viewers. Although commentary ranged from pointless critique to thought-provoking engagement, constructive interactivity was highly visible.
To study viewers’ reactions to the video for the second line of analysis, I drew a random sample of 100 comments from the 1,906 posted comments. I numbered each comment from 1 to 1,906 and then used a random-number generator to select 100 of these comments. I sought to obtain a representative sample of the entire corpus of comments in order to analyze them according to levels of engagement with the video. The analysis of comments revealed the diversity of opinions on the subject as well as the opportunities and challenges for sharing anthropological material through connected learning models.
Drawing on scholarship from anthropology, sociology, and game design, Boellstorff and his colleagues argue in their book, Ethnography and Virtual Worlds, that “descriptive” quantitative information may be necessary for uncovering patterns in digital ethnography studies.4 By collecting a random sample from a larger number of voices, ethnographic work may reach a broader swath of opinions than only those from a delineated ethnographic study. Analysis of text commentary from a heterogeneous group supplements information from interviewees who attended gatherings and were thus invested in the topic.
Media anthropologist Gabriele de Seta argues that ethnographic participation in digital environments lies on a spectrum from watching interaction to exhibiting a more “active presence” that “extends in different dimensions according to the platforms used, the devices at hand, software availability, access to connectivity in time and space, as well as the social circles and practices one participates in.”5 The meaning of the term “participation” in digital ethnography is often taken for granted, de Seta argues, although it connotes numerous levels of interactive intensity. By participating as a video maker rather than a lurker, I was able to experience—but also tasked with—dealing with a broad array of reactions to the video’s contemplations on the prospects for achieving community.
De Seta’s point underscores the importance of acknowledging the shifting boundaries and connotations of digital participation in a single study over time. Numerous technical and social features shape the possibilities for making videos and participating in mediated groups. For example, I edited my video at a YouTube editor’s request so that it could be featured. The original version contained footage of an interview with a YouTube employee. However, because YouTube had a policy of not featuring staff members in front-page content, the editors requested that I remove this footage and repost the video. I acquiesced because I wanted to see, from a research perspective, what would happen if my video appeared on the “front page of YouTube.” I left both versions of What Defines a Community? on YouTube using the same title. However, it was the abridged video that was featured and is discussed here.
As comments were being posted, I elected not to moderate them. When comments exceeded more than a few dozen, it became tedious and time-consuming to moderate each one, let alone reciprocate by responding. According to new media theorist and activist Geert Lovink, “Writers, editors, and moderators play a vital role in establishing a culture of frequent commenting.”6 The difficulty of dealing with a high volume of responses suggests that we are not understanding commentary as much as gaining a general impression of it. As Lovink observed, “Instead of a close reading, we practice intuitive scanning.”7 To address the challenges raised by scale, this analysis engaged in a close reading of a representative sample. At an indeterminate time between June 2014 and June 2018, comments were edited and many were removed. I do not recall receiving an explanation about why only 552 comments were left on the video as of June 2018.8
My decision to forgo comment moderation caused confusion among my viewers. Friends from video-blogging circles urged me to delete hurtful and threatening comments. Although I was tempted to do so, moderating comments risked changing the outcome of the research. Overmoderation might privilege my personal predilections and foreclose forthright debate about the acceptability of diverse forms of public commentary. How could discussions about what is appropriate occur if the researcher’s judgment influenced which potentially controversial commentary was removed? Artificially sanitizing the data risked depicting a false picture of positive participation.
The decision to leave distasteful commentary yielded methodological and theoretical insights. Ultimately any choice about comment moderation (removing or retaining comments) potentially influences the data creation as well as collection. To the extent that abusive commentary may be compared to graffiti or subversive public messages, leaving such commentary possibly attracted additional offensive commentary and should arguably be removed.9 The graffiti effect refers to the idea that comment “vandalism” tends to attract like-minded remarks. Therefore, leaving hurtful commentary may have biased the data in a negative direction. Of course, comment moderation, like graffiti removal, does not guarantee freedom from subversive postings.10 A freshly cleaned, blank slate is known to prompt hurtful messages. Because some people have fun writing words that wound, inappropriate commentary will likely never disappear, despite efforts to improve participatory, digital literacies.
No position of pure neutrality exists with respect to comment moderation on public research sites. De Seta argues that investigations of problematic behaviors such as trolling tend to fall on specific axes; researchers display either endorsement or critique.11 According to de Seta, some scholars attempt to contextualize antisocial behavior while others denounce unethical communicative practices. In his work on trolling, de Seta takes a more dialogical approach, which includes involving commentary, even of the distasteful variety. In part, the goal is to invite social media users’ own interpretations, a position similar to that taken in this analysis. Rather than remove comments (including those I found ethically and personally objectionable), the goal was to leave them up for examination beyond a single researcher’s interpretation. The exercise revealed that any comment-wrangling choice inevitably had ramifications on what constituted the data itself.
The third line of evidence involved analyzing representative case studies of videos in which YouTubers address the subject themselves. This line of analysis revealed that YouTubers have mixed feelings about its prospects. Taking the three lines of evidence together, it is clear that community remains an important topic on the site and that YouTubers’ diverse narratives echo prior theoretical rubrics of community. The most pertinent model for this analysis is that of Benedict Anderson’s idea of imagined community. YouTubers bonded ideationally and through participation in shared media. Video makers spent considerable energy pondering the question of what defines a community, often in ways that closely resemble theoretical scrutiny in the anthropological record.
Reconsiderations of Community
The concept of community is notoriously difficult to analyze. Anthropologist Anthony Cohen noted that the term “community” “has proved to be highly resistant to satisfactory definition in anthropology and sociology.”12 YouTubers’ wide diversity of opinions on community is perhaps not surprising, given that scholars have spent a hundred years contemplating its meaning. Early analyses privileged place as community’s most common criterion.13 The communities that anthropologists studied were typically distinctive, small, homogeneous, and self-sufficient. Yet scholars have acknowledged that “no real community is perfectly so.”14 Studies of urban settings, diaspora, and reconsiderations of anthropology as a field science have problematized place as the locus of community.15 Group members typically use this term when they believe they have “something in common” and that this something “distinguishes” them from people in other groups.16 Under this rubric community is relational because it opposes attributes in one group to those of another. For example, YouTubers saw themselves as different from friends and family who did not share their interests in making videos, accomplishing sociality through media, or participating on YouTube.
In their comments on What Defines a Community? people sometimes had difficulty accepting mediated groups as true communities. Sociologists Barry Wellman and Milena Gulia argue that people who refuse to accept the possibility of online community “are confusing the pastoralist myth of community for the reality.”17 They argue that “community ties are already geographically dispersed, sparsely knit, connected heavily by telecommunications [and] specialized in content.”18 Approaching the subject from an anthropological perspective, Vered Amit argues that more recent studies of contemporary communities show that they are “situationally limited,” “ephemeral,” and “episodic,” yet community relationships “nonetheless facilitate the development of a much appreciated sense of belonging.”19 It is arguably the case that “all communities are virtual communities” (emphasis original)20 if the term “virtual communities” connotes people who mutually identify with particular interests rather than being physically co-located. The term “virtual” is often used to refer to mediated, “dispersed” interaction but is (mis)interpreted to mean not quite “real.” In fact, communities have actually never existed as the idealized tropes that linger in the popular imagination. Amit argues that community is not a locally bound entity but rather an “idea or quality of sociality” that privileges collective identities.21
Benedict Anderson’s idea of “imagined communities” powerfully reconceptualized the concept of community and serves as a useful rubric for understanding networked communities. It has been applied to the study of numerous realms, including groups on YouTube and Twitter.22 Imagined communities are not “imaginary” or fictional but are rather internally “imagined” because its members “never know most of their fellow members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.”23 Imagined communities are formed among dispersed, mass audiences.24 According to Anderson, people feel loyal to a collective partly through mediated practices that promote hegemonic, nationalist agendas. For instance, ritualized media practices such as reading national newspapers across the United States every morning “simultaneously” and “sequentially” created a communal collective with shared experiences and ideas.25 People may never meet fellow Americans, but through media they are aware of common experiences and loyalties.
Engaging in ritualized media such as reading the morning newspaper in standard, national languages is a key aspect of Anderson’s rubric. These rituals enabled people to simultaneously access information about events and thus feel a collective sense of moving through historical moments together. Temporally speaking, the fact that a newspaper’s contents reached obsolescence on the “morrow of its printing” did not hinder but rather played a crucial role in helping members of the imagined community ideationally envision other people who would be reading it simultaneously, receiving similar information, and seeing themselves as part of an experiential collective at a specific moment in time. Critics of Anderson’s concept urge an exploration of how communities are formed not just through mental “ideation,”26 which alone does not account for intensive commitment such as dying for one’s country, but through interactions and shared experiences that address infrastructural complications posed by various stakeholders.27
Anderson’s analysis focused on media rituals such as reading newspapers. The number of Americans who read physical newspapers is declining. Still, 50 percent of Americans between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine and 49 percent between thirty and forty-nine access news articles online, suggesting that people still wish to obtain information from collective sources, although increasingly in digital form.28 Offering mass content is a key way of establishing temporal media rituals that create a collective. Having human editors curate videos for the welcome page enabled YouTube viewers to engage in cultural content available to everyone on the site. Although human editors at least partly curated aspects of YouTube’s front-page content in 2007,29 the site changed its welcome page layout several times between 2009 and 2013. Using algorithms, individual welcome pages foregrounded material that viewers would likely watch on the basis of their viewing patterns.30 The “front page of YouTube” became different for each user. As of 2018, it focused on recommendations to keep people tuned in rather than videos to encourage collective viewing experiences, the way readers experienced newspapers—or prior iterations of YouTube.
Featuring vernacular videos to broad audiences at a single moment in time was one way that YouTubers shared media experiences that facilitated community formation. Drawing on Lefebvre’s temporal analysis, it is clear that sharing moments at the same time fostered a sense of communal experience. For example, six years after my video had been posted, one viewer left a comment that intertwined our mediated histories with that of YouTube. Trebuchet1221 stated: “This was one of the first videos I can remember watching on youtube, I recall seeing this featured on the front page back in 2007 after I uploaded my first video. Man this brings me back.”
Despite frequent layout changes, YouTubers connected through video. Vloggers who believe that YouTube is a community “see themselves as a group of people brought together by their shared interest in authoring video blogs; they interact with each other through different tools, both on-site and through back-channels, and create a unique culture comprised of linguistic terms and gestures.”31 According to information studies scholars Dana Rotman and Jennifer Preece, discussions about YouTube’s community might originate “from a comment, reflection or question video-posted by one of the more popular vloggers who reflected upon the nature of the YouTube community. Response videos and comments continued these discussions over a prolonged period of time.”32 Media and communication scholars Stuart Cunningham and David Craig note that social media entertainment may also be characterized as “communitainment,” which incorporates social media, communication, and interactivity as well as “an ethos of community (an ecology where fans, subscribers, and supporters directly constitute the communities that trigger the sustainability of content creator careers).”33
At this point, community is as much fantasy as social science. As Cohen argued, “Community exists in the minds of its members, and should not be confused with geographic or sociographic assertions of ‘fact.’”34 In studying digital communities, communication studies scholar Howard Rheingold similarly observed that, “Community is a matter of emotions as well as a thing of reason and data.”35 Researchers have observed many YouTube articulations about community, in part because of a connection creators make to others who share an interest in making YouTube videos.36 As communication scholar Michael Strangelove observed, “Amateur online video practices bring strangers together and often turn them into friends.”37 Despite its contested status, the concept of community “retains connotations of interpersonal warmth, shared interests, and loyalty.”38
Whether or not YouTube functions as a “true” community is less fruitful to adjudicate given its shifting and heterogeneous populations. A more interesting task is exploring the criteria that groups use to make their determination and the ways in which they express their ideals. Inspired by anthropologist Mary Douglas, Strangelove argues that “it is this very process of debate that constitutes a community and perpetuates its very existence.”39 Examining opinions about community is facilitated by YouTube’s discursive environment, in which “there is much reflection on the norms and ideals of the community.”40 Community is discursive terrain and an ideal that will continue to be debated in mediated groups because it is a cyclical, recurring phenomenon. Each new group that meets on a digital site and bonds through mediated, shared experiences negotiates its status over time.
Interviewees Analyze Prospects for Community on YouTube
Interviewees’ responses about whether YouTube was or could be a community constitute the first line of evidence discussed in this chapter. Notably, interviewees used criteria that mapped closely to those in the updated scholarly record. However, contrary to more common characterizations that emphasize homogeneity as central, people whom I interviewed did not always see community as delineated only by cultural sameness or even mutual regard. Notably, several interviewees cited diversity, conflict, and separate groups of friends operating in parallel in their discussion of what defined a community.
ShortbusMooner, the YouTuber whose opinions on community opened this chapter, based her assessment on multifaceted criteria, including willingness to meet up, mutual helping, drama and conflict, and multiple community groups. ShortbusMooner joined about a year prior to her SouthTube interview. She vlogged about concerts and YouTube meet-ups she attended as well as sunsets, a friend’s new drum set, cats, gardens, and facts about herself. Her videos see a few hundred to a thousand views. She had 404 subscribers as of June 2018.41
ShortbusMooner’s privileging of meet-ups as important underscores that it is crucial to experience co-temporal social interactions, which facilitate emotionally driven identities of belonging.42 She also cites traditional ideas of helping others. At the same time, she also observed the “inevitable drama” on YouTube that she avoids but that is nevertheless part of collective sociality.
Similar to ShortbusMooner, DaleATL2 (his YouTube channel name) also accepted multiple types of participation as important. He optimistically felt that it was tolerance of diversity that demonstrated that YouTube was a community. DaleATL2 was a white man from the South in his early forties who had been on YouTube for a year and four months when I interviewed him. He created humorous vlogs with his family as well as movie parodies and vlogs of places he visited. Most of his videos garner hundreds of views each, although many see thousands of views. As of June 2018, he had 2,404 subscribers. DaleATL2 lists aspects of diversity such as race, religion, and sexual orientation as key factors in shaping YouTube’s community. He stated:
If you’ve gotten video of this whole event, you have seen a cross section of society that goes from race, creed, religion, sexual orientation, you name it. And it’s all right here at this event. And that to me is the definition of community, but better. Because you’ve got people getting past the stereotypes and seeing people as people, as individuals.
Narratives also contained conflicting criteria that accepted oppositional factors as facilitating group sociality. Such portrayals in effect underscore DaleATL2’s perhaps idealistic observations about YouTube diversity. For example, an interviewee named proudyke (her YouTube channel name) was a white woman in her late forties who had been on YouTube for just over a year at the time of her interview. She posted vlogs, political videos, and tribute videos to family members and celebrities who had passed away. Her view counts vary from less than a hundred each to a few with a thousand, such as those featuring a political figure or a YouTube celebrity. She had 333 subscribers as of June 2018.
Proudyke initially states that it is “cohesiveness” and “camaraderie” that constitutes community on YouTube. Yet she also accepts “haters” as community members given that YouTube represents a “microcosm” of a society. She addresses naysayers who do not believe that digital sites can foster deep levels of connection, calling YouTube a “real” community. Interviewees generally defined haters as people who post pointlessly mean-spirited, inarticulate, or harsh criticism, such as “this sucks,” or cruel comments unrelated to the video, such as “go die.”43 For proudyke, even haters are part of the community, even if their commentary is discomforting. Although harassing behavior should be addressed, scholars argue that community participants nevertheless bond over the shared experience of dealing with haters and trolls.44
Narratives also contained descriptions of interconnected YouTube groups. Interviewees who saw YouTube’s community this way included ZenArcher and lemonette (their YouTube channel names). ZenArcher was a white man in his early fifties who pioneered vlogging on YouTube by recounting his philosophies on life, often dealing with topics such as religion, ethics, and life choices. Each of his videos received several hundred to thousands of views. As of June 2108, he had 3,124 subscribers. Having joined the site a year and a half before our interview in 2007, he was very active in the social side of YouTube. Several tribute videos of him appeared after he reportedly passed away in 2015.
ZenArcher surprised some commenters when he stated that he knew many YouTubers better than he knew his own neighbors. For ZenArcher, YouTube’s social circles resembled groups in one’s local community, which creates a sense of community on the site. Larger groups often divided into smaller, interconnected circles of friends and acquaintances. Like proudyke, ZenArcher referenced the microcosm aspect of YouTube. In terms of interconnected groups, he explained how he traveled between them:
[YouTube] is a community in every way that your city is a community. There are kids that are running around with skateboards jumping on park benches. It’s at YouTube. There is, uh, political people at YouTube. There are the Paris Hiltons and the Jamie Kennedys that entertain because it’s their business and they’re there. And none of it hurts YouTube. It all helps YouTube because it is a community just like the city that you live in. So when you go out in the city and you see an old woman having trouble putting groceries in her car, that’s at YouTube. When you see somebody that’s acting up and having a good time, that’s at YouTube. It is a community, and there are little circles, like in your community you have your group of friends and somebody else has their group of friends, and you have a friend that goes between, that happens at YouTube. There are little circles. I don’t belong to any one of those circles, but I’m one who travels between those circles. And that’s what community’s all about.
Lemonette similarly believed YouTube was a community, but that it included many social groups. Lemonette was a white woman in her early fifties from the South who made comedic vlogs, often from her car. Her videos regularly saw several thousand views each, and she had an impressive following among vloggers, boasting 5,828 subscribers as of June 2018. I interviewed her about a year after she had joined the site. The idea of community had limits, she believed, given that “not everybody wants to join in.” She noted that at least “they can still have their say and their show can’t get canceled.” Her view is perhaps optimistic. YouTubers certainly reported receiving strikes against their account as well as suspensions and deletions for posting copyrighted material. But her point is well taken. If people followed the terms of service as interpreted by YouTube, they had a platform to share their voice and interact.
Not everyone whom I interviewed agreed that YouTube, or even the social groups that I was studying, formed a community. Across the study a few interviewees mentioned intensive self-promotion as a primary reason that people attended gatherings rather than to achieve sincere sociality. Yet these voices tended to be the minority. For most interviewees, sharing an interest in videos, engaging in co-temporal “shared happenings” such as attending meet-ups, collectively viewing and commenting on videos, collaborating on video projects, and hanging out socially were crucial activities for achieving community formation.
Commenters Weigh In
Commenters who posted to my video revealed an interest in or at least curiosity about networked community. An analysis of these comments serves as the second line of evidence discussed in this chapter. Writing from the perspective of conducting anthropological research through digital ethnography, Pink and her colleagues propose the term “stakeholder ethnography” to characterize the practice of involving partners in research who are interested in similar issues but who “are not versed in the existing anthropological concepts that are commonly used to refer to such complex sets of relationships or with the debates underpinning them.”45 Stakeholders exhibit concerns similar to those of researchers, or at least demonstrate a willingness to collaboratively explore them.
Commenters interpellated themselves into the research as proposed stakeholders when they shared their views on how YouTube exhibits or complicates community formation.46 Pink and her colleagues’ ideas might be productively combined with the notion of “para-ethnography” as advanced by anthropologists Douglas Holmes and George Marcus. Para-ethnography is inquiry in which the proposed subjects of ethnography are engaged in similar intellectual work as that being conducted by the researcher. Although research participants are not aware of traditional anthropological theories, para-ethnography invites them to be “epistemic partners” with researchers to achieve a “common analytical exchange.”47 Drawing on the Malinowskian tradition of anthropology, para-ethnography invokes the “native point of view” while also recognizing ambiguities in the ethnographic encounter. Para-ethnography is meaningful for digitally based ethnographic projects because it is concerned with “analytical engagements” that examine “formations of culture that are not fully contingent on convention, tradition, and the past, but rather, constitute future-oriented cognitive practices that can generate novel configurations of meaning and action.”48 Para-ethnography in this context is concerned with identifying future possibilities of community formation through discourse-based analysis.
The random sample of 100 comments revealed three principal forms of engagement. They included videos that interacted with: (1) the video’s content; (2) the video maker; and (3) other commenters. In addition to interactivity, other analytical categories included hating, spamming, profanity, whether the commenter posted more than one comment, and whether the comment appeared in an interactive comment thread (defined as two or more comments that include responses to others on the same topic).
Interactivity to content is defined as discussing information, ideas, or events in the video. The following is an example of a comment that is interactive to the video’s content: “Its [sic] not a community as much as an online forum is. While it does allow for interaction, it doesn’t cater for this as much as a forum. Youtube is more a platform to broadcast. IMO.” In this case the commenter disagrees with the main findings of the video but responds to the main topic of the video. Comments that qualify as interactive to the video maker respond directly to the creator. Examples include “Check your headroom on interviews” or “CONGRATS PATRICIA!!!!!!!” While the former comment provides advice on how I should improve my technique, the latter comment shows support for my achievement of being featured.
A comment that is interactive to another commenter directly addresses another commenter or the substance of their post. For example, one commenter expressed confusion about why my video was anthropological, stating: “I think there is a [misunderstanding] here, an anthropology is the science of study of ancient [civilization], how they live, how they socialize or engage to each other.” Another commenter exhibited interactivity with this commenter by offering to correct this impression: “The misunderstanding is yours. Anthropology studies human beings in all times and places doing all kinds of things. There are anthropologists studying Mcdonald’s [sic] employee culture and fashion and memes and current practices of female genital mutilation etc.” Commenters sometimes interacted with each other by discussing material within and surrounding the context of the video.
Comments could be interactive in more than one way, as in the following comment by fredrika27. The comment not only addresses the topic of the video but responds to another commenter. It also tacitly provides support to the video maker.
What is your problem? This person happens to be undertaking serious research and asking legitimate questions. As a Youtuber, I take offense at your allegation. I have a BA, two MAs and a PhD. I’ve done research in the US, Germany and Kenya. Much [of] my research has been done in the internet community and helped people better understand their world.
The commenter is interactive to another commenter and analyzes the merits of my work. The comment responds to the content of the video by talking about research on the internet community. The commenter contributes to the creation of a “para-ethnography,” by revealing personal background information such as educational achievement and experience conducting research on several internet communities.
In general, the commentary exhibited more interactivity (36 percent) than hate (26 percent). Given YouTube’s reputation for problematic commentary, the random sample unsurprisingly included numerous hater comments containing pointlessly harsh criticism or profanity, such as “this is the most horrible video I have ever seen” and “what the fuck . . .” Hater comments also included sexualized or misogynist insults such as “What defines a community? a team of women working together to suck cock n balls. that’s teamwork. especially when everyone is lending a helping hand. scrutum!” According to communication studies scholar Joseph Reagle, who engaged in a detailed study of online commentary, offensive remarks often reveal an intensely gendered dimension.49
Conversely, 36 percent of the random sample contained constructive commentary, which was defined as interacting with the video content without containing hate (see table 5.1 for a list of major categories).
Table 5.1. Major Categories in the Random Sample of 100 Comments
Category | Number of Comments |
---|---|
Constructive commentary that addressed video content | 36 |
Hater commentary | 26 |
Commentary that addressed the video’s quality or execution | 18 |
Commentary that constructively addressed another commenter (on and off the video topic) | 14 |
Commentary that unconstructively addressed another commenter | 12 |
Interactively indeterminate | 11 |
Commentary that addressed the video maker | 8 |
Spam | 8 |
Note: Comments could be coded in more than one category; therefore, the total is more than 100.
The sample also contained a fair amount of spam (8 percent), such as chain-letter-type comments and solicitations to watch unrelated videos. Indecipherable comments were those that were acontextualized, rendering precise categorization difficult. An example of an indeterminate comment would be “Why are people so ignorant?” I surmised that this comment was targeted at other commenters. However, without further details, this comment could technically be addressing the interviewees within the video or the filmmaker herself.
Assessments of YouTube’s Prospects for Community
Commenters in the sample expressed a more diverse assessment of whether YouTube was a community than did interviewees at meet-ups. Six commenters believed that YouTube was or could be a community, while two said it was partially a community. Eight commenters said it was not, while fifteen commenters did not weigh in using definitive judgments and were thus “neutral” comments. Twenty-one comments used the word “community,” and an additional ten comments discussed dimensions of community without using the term. Some commenters solely weighed in with their opinion, such as the remark “It’s a big community!!!” or “Youtube has none of the definitions of community. Sorry,” while others rhetorically justified their view. For example, a comment by maggothon provided context for his opinion: “I [agree] timur 1lenk, I have found such a community on YouTube and it has been a positive experience for me. I have made friends in several different countries as well as other parts of this country, we ‘[communicate], gather around ideas’ and so on just as you said. I love it.” Maggothon’s comment is actually a response to another commenter called timur1lenk. Over an interactive thread of four comments to each other, they agreed that YouTube was a community that was geographically dispersed and had facilitated friendship connections internationally. In this exchange the comment displayed two forms of interactivity. One form was related to the content of the video, and the other to another commenter.
Timur1lenk’s comment did not appear in the random sample and thus was not counted in the final tallies, but it is provided here for context. Timur1lenk followed maggothon’s comment with the following reply: “[YouTube] is world wide community giving everybody [possibility] to [exchange] the thoughts about something, to communicate world wide. People communicate, gathering around ideas, get organised about [ideas], influence on others by commenting or [posting] videos.” In an earlier post Timur1lenk expressed the belief that YouTube did not control comments and that this lack of censorship facilitates bridging differences in cultures, countries, and “even religions,” thus echoing interviewees’ notions of diversity as a defining characteristic of community. This comment thread is interesting not only because it shows how a video might stimulate reflection on a scholarly subject but also because it suggests the potential for spurring discussion between viewers themselves, yielding connected forms of learning. Rather than functioning pedantically, dialogic videos seek to stimulate reflection and discussion as commenters explore their truth.
Commenters might interact with video content by disagreeing with the interviewees’ beliefs. A commenter named ShrinerMcbitey disagreed that YouTube was a community and stated:
I’m sorry, but you are pathetic if this is your “community.” One person commented he knew you tube better than his neighbors. . . . umm yeah thats [sic] a problem. And that’s not what “community is all [about].” The internet in general may connect people who otherwise would not have, in [general] though electronic communication is bad communication. Remember communication is 85% non verbal.
ShrinerMcbitey not only disagrees that YouTube is a community but also judges people who believe that it is, calling them “pathetic.” Particularly distressing to this commenter was ZenArcher’s statement that he could know YouTubers more than his own neighbors. ShrinerMcbitey’s objections echo earlier anthropological models of community as rooted to place. To the extent that interactivity is important, such comments are productive because they explore dimensions of the issue even if they disagree with content. Constructive comments may include justification for a person’s views and may invite additional reflection.
Articulating a position and marshaling evidence to defend it are important steps for exploring civic issues. These comments suggest the potential for open, public discussions. Yet they also suggest that work is required to draw out viewers who wish to weigh in but may need participatory encouragement or development of rhetorical skills to craft arguments that bolster their positions.
Fifteen commenters engaged with the topic in a way that was “neutral”; they did not explicitly state whether they regarded YouTube as a community. An example of a neutral comment is the following post by danbergam: “A community is given by the interaction between human beings. The more is the sincere effort spent by each one of its members, the more that community is accomplished.” The comment is weighted more toward exploring a definition for the term rather than expressing a direct opinion about the YouTube community. It is possible that viewers may try to infer from the comment whether YouTube resonates as a community. For example, viewers who believed that YouTube did offer the means to interact in “sincere” ways might infer that this definition qualified YouTube as a community.
In another neutral comment a poster named Fatpandas provided three scholarly citations for its definition:
A community is:
A collection of interdependent people who share a common residential locality and some feeling of belonging (Edgar, Earle and Flop, 1993)
or
Any social category or aggregate that [has] a shared sense of membership (Water and Cook, 1993)
or
set of independent and interacting members with a common identity and common fate with a set of ethics governing relationships. (Klessig, 1996)
Fatpandas’ comment is constructive not only because it provides definitions but because it offers scholarly citations from sources that explore the meaning and application of the community concept. Such participation resembles “para-ethnography,” in which researchers work alongside other experts or epistemological stakeholders in an investigative terrain.
In this case Fatpandas wrote themselves into the research project by sharing citations of potentially enlightening scholarly works. The first citation, which likely references Edgar, Earle, and Fopp’s sociological work Introduction to Australian Society (1993), emphasizes residence and belonging as key criteria. The second citation, which may refer to Waters and Crook’s Sociology One: Principles of Sociological Analysis for Australians (1993), emphasizes a shared sense of membership. This is constructive commentary because it widens the scope of knowledge sharing. Rather than only drawing on personal experiences, Fatpandas provides information that invites other commenters to consider multiple scholarly perspectives. Neutral comments that share key information are arguably just as important as expressions of clear-cut positions for expanding para-ethnographies. Rather than weighing in with views that are definitive but not well supported, neutral comments invite consideration of multiple dimensions of complex sociological concepts.
Criteria for Defining Community
A key goal for this exercise was to identify criteria that YouTubers used to assess community. Although no particular characteristic received a critical mass of agreement, four commenters said that some sense of sameness in terms of identity was important. In contrast, one commenter pointed out that diversity was an integral characteristic. While two commenters claimed that geography was important, three said that it was not. Four commenters noted that being able to communicate online was insufficient for guaranteeing community formation. Interestingly, Lennyfoshenny, a commenter who said that communities like YouTube are being created because they bring together people from “different social situations,” also noted that YouTubers “share many traits in common.” It is the combination of both diversity and sameness that leads to feelings of closeness. Lennyfoshenny stated:
In my opinion, a community does not have to be based on geographical location. I believe a community is where a tight bond between people is formed that includes people from all sorts of different social situations. Due to globalization today, people from across the world share many different traits in common, which is why communities like youtube are becoming far more easily created.
Definitional elements of community also included helping others, feeling a sense of safety, understanding one’s social responsibility, knowing one’s neighbors, feeling an intensive bond, exhibiting a “collective consciousness” (which echoes the posthuman discussion developed in chapter 6), and using similar forms of media. STEELPOT1’s comment is particularly interesting because it evokes scholarly notions of “imagined community” that orient around mediated interaction and knowledge circulation that are temporally in sync. STEELPOT1 argued:
[Community] . . . a microcosm, fraction of society. Entire United States is built of [these] “microcosms” based on geographical locations. Major town or county surrounded by locals. All watch the same weather, news, read the same paper etc.
In STEELPOT1’s model, a community is a “fraction of society” that is based on geography. In line with Lefebvre’s call to parse temporal influences, this answer echoes Anderson, whose analysis includes accessing and watching “the same weather” and “news” and reading “the same paper” at the same time in order to reinforce communal experiences.50
Critics of the imagined community concept suggest that it overemphasizes homogeneity, ignores the role of conflict, and pays insufficient attention to how institutional, political, and economic forces shape community.51 Notably, themes of conflict and contestation appeared in the comments. A few argued that the authoritarian and economic forces that undergird YouTube complicate achieving genuine community. In one such comment, PresOfWeb noted:
Youtube is a dictatorship. [Its] members don’t establish the guidelines. Youtube is a business; it forces us to view ads for [its] sponsored videos. Youtube is a monopoly, buying out the competition.
PresOfWeb observed that participants do not establish their own guidelines and that strictures established by the corporate entity of YouTube are implemented for commercialization and profit. For some commenters, the word “community” could also connote a frivolous, banal, or insincere quality.52 Commenters complained that celebrities on the site merely simulate an interest in fostering a community to self-promote. Maggothon stated:
Anthrovlog: i agree. the word “commune” refers to the desire to “talk over” or “discuss” and “community” as a group of people having a common interest and being in the same vicinity is not a requirement. the level of commitment is what you are hearing here. these folks are more interested in dissing one another, you or the people on the film and that would not be a community, as they correctly state they are in it for the entertainment or to just make “comments.” To be continued
Notably, maggothon reiterates the importance of community’s rhetorical aspects by citing the importance of “communing” and “discussing” its parameters. Such a position echoes this chapter’s main argument about the centrality of participation and discourse to create and sustain community. In a “meta” way, maggothon emphasizes the importance of ongoing dialogue by noting that the discussion is “to be continued.”
Constructive Interactivity
Comments coded as constructive in this analysis included attributes such as offering a sincere reaction, justifying an opinion, critiquing the material discussed within the video, or adding information. More than one-third of the comments in the random sample addressed central content in the video, such as anthropology, community, or sociality. Interactivity among commenters suggests that under the right circumstances, networked dialogue through the circulation of visual research may be a productive exercise.
Interactivity also occurred between commenters who discussed themes in the video. Even strongly worded interactions could be intellectually productive, as in the following thread:
blaggabloogy: Bottom Line . . . Youtube is a corporate entity established for the sole means of turning a profit. You guys are buying into this shit hook, line, and sinker.
rabidzebu32: so true
cavwondagainsti69: Um, as if every community isn’t in some way a capitalist center, with excess as its agenda? face it. [Random sample comment #1]
blaggabloogy: Some communities, not ALL. The Youtube “community” is simply in existence as the result of a corporate entity trying to make money. It was NOT established with the belief that it would—in any way—benefit its members. Good point though. I just don’t like the way they try to market the whole “Youtube” community facade. It’s so phony. But, don’t get me wrong, I’m all for Capitalism. Just get off the “community” ploy.
Cavwondagainsti69’s comment is the one that appeared in the random sample, and it is clearly interactively posted in response to blaggabloogy’s comment that YouTube is a “corporate entity.” Blaggabloogy states that it is misguided to believe that community could emerge from a commercialized platform. Even worse, to believe that YouTube could be a community is to buy into a corporate agenda that uses such interpersonal rhetoric to lure in consumers who will watch videos, thereby justifying advertising and marketing tactics. Cavwondagainsti69 takes issue with this comment by stating that every community is entrenched in capitalism, thus challenging the idea that a corporate platform cannot promote community because of its commercial goals. Whether one agrees or disagrees with these strongly worded contentions, clearly commenters engaged with each another on relevant issues. This exchange is consistent with Julie Uldam and Tina Askanius’s research findings on contentious climate debates on YouTube. Writing from the perspective of business and communicative theory, they found that even “hostile” exchanges could lead to “reciprocity” and “dialogue.”53
In addition to interactivity as assessed in terms of engagement with video content or with other commenters, an additional category of interactivity included direct responses to the video maker. Eight percent of the comments included a remark addressed to me and were either positive (two comments) or negative (six comments) in their assessments of my approach or ability. For example, one commenter negatively stated, “this isn’t funny at all. nice try but better luck next time,” whereas another (from someone whom I had met previously in the video blogging community) said, “congrats, this is awesome!!!”
Commenters not only reflected on content; they also explored nuanced dimensions of intellectual concepts with other people, much the way students in a seminar might debate issues among themselves after being prompted by an instructor. In addition, just as classroom discussions exhibit tangents and heated exchanges, similar behaviors appeared in the video’s commentary. Education is an ongoing process. Involving heterogeneous audiences in discussions about complex social science concepts will take time, patience, and cultivation of constructive self-expression.
Arrhythmic Acceptance
The random sample revealed that commenters experienced prospects for community at different rates, producing participatory arrhythmias, or what Lefebvre saw as multiple conflicting and discomforting rhythms. The interviewees and a few commenters clearly saw evidence that YouTube was a community or at least contained social support and interconnections that could facilitate it on the site. For instance, maggothon’s comment above noted that he had “made friends in several different countries as well as other parts of this country.” The experience had been “positive” for him, enabling him to “communicate” and to “gather around ideas.”
Alternatively, some commenters in the random sample were only just learning that people were interacting on the site in this way. Building social closeness takes time, and comments revealed that YouTube participants were experiencing asymmetrical, arrhythmic knowledge of YouTube as a community. While some commenters such as ghostinvestigator began opening their minds to the possibility of achieving it after seeing the case study in the video, others remained skeptical. Ghostinvestigator exemplified a more positive reaction to community’s prospects:
I think this is great! With all the negativity that goes on in the internet world it’s awesome to see people actually coming together for good. :)
Similarly, a commenter named garthward expressed more conservatism but acknowledged that aspects of a “global village” may exist, even if participants achieve awareness of it at different rates. The commenter discourages readers from becoming “obsessed,” which also indicates trepidation with its acceptance: “Well . . . don’t get obsessed with YT but it does delineate some aspects of the global village and collective consciousness even if some of us aren’t aware of it yet.” Commenters also exhibited skepticism about the feasibility of internet sociality given concerns about safety, as demonstrated in the comment from nitrofreakmanho:
that was kind of weird . . . I never knew there was a Youtube gathering . . . what if some freak that you “think” you know shows up and then a kid goes missing . . . don’t get me wrong, I think Youtube is great but this is different.
Commenters and interviewees did not accept the possibility of community at the same rate. They exhibited an arrhythmic pace of acceptance of community, which arguably limits its intensity to members of social groups that simultaneously experience an ethos of community. Commensurate with Lefebvre’s and Anderson’s analyses, the simultaneity of acceptance emerged as a factor in facilitating YouTube community. As the YouTube case shows, websites tend to exhibit relatively short cycles of intensive participation (roughly three to five years) before people in specific social groups move on, sometimes to newer, cooler sites. This implies that asymmetrical temporal acceptance of community on websites complicates widespread and possibly sustained uptake in sociality. While a few commenters expressed openness and interest in sociality once they encountered it through the video, others acknowledged its possibilities but were not ready to embrace it fully because of their concerns. What Defines a Community? appeared to a mass audience who exhibited diverse interpretations, some of them accepting of its content. Other commenters engaged in adversarial or even unintended readings of its ethnographic findings.
Aberrant Readings
When sharing their work, visual anthropologists are concerned with how audiences will receive the material. Particularly disturbing are scenarios in which viewers engage in what Peruvian filmmaker and visual anthropologist Wilton Martínez calls “aberrant readings” of films. Aberrant readings contradict a filmmaker’s communicative intentions and only “reinforce stereotypes of otherness.”54 It is safe to say that comments such as “BOO dorks! old fat people!” constitute aberrant readings of What Defines a Community? Such comments reference images in the video, but not in meaningful or respectful ways. They refer to people in the video but reinforce negative ageist and weightist stereotypes. My video intended to visually depict people of diverse groups who explored well-articulated thoughts about community.
One solution is to provide fuller context for ethnographic videos. Pink argues that “a limitation of anthropological film is that it lacks the cultural contextualization and theoretical explicitness that are sometimes necessary to promote cross-cultural understanding.”55 One approach involves using the technical features of video-platforms including accompanying text, video lectures, or digital annotations that could be overlaid on videos.
However, using such tools does not guarantee their use or their adequate interpretation.56 Anthropologist Peter Wogan observed that students may respond in playful or disrespectful ways to uncomfortable material, even when viewing high-quality ethnographic films in serious classroom settings. Wogan studied classroom reactions to classical visual ethnographies. He observed that abruptly incongruous juxtapositions of images influenced interpretation. Unexpected images, such as an indigenous man wearing a tin-can headpiece, prompted responses such as laughter—even when students were prepared to experience visual, cultural differences.57
Providing too much classroom mentorship or information in visual works may also complicate student exploration of nuanced material. Wogan argues that “we should recognize our capacity as instructors to fill in filmic gaps that trouble us, and we should allow students to wrestle with complexities.”58 Dialogical approaches carry risk as they may reinforce stereotypes. However, it is also true that avoiding dealing with offensive stereotypes does nothing to dispel them. An argument exits that through diversity in discussion, insight may one day be achieved.
Unmasking Anonymity’s Role in Discourse
A central debate in discourses about the effectiveness of networked knowledge exchange concerns the role of anonymity.59 Specifically, it is believed that the assumed anonymity of interactants is largely responsible for problematic behaviors, such as posting mean-spirited or even threatening comments. These concerns prompt an investigation into what extent anonymity influenced the timbre of discourse in the present study. Notably, being anonymous online does not create commenters’ prior rampant racism, homophobia, sexism, or other prejudices; those who engage in hurtful discourse at root likely already hold these biases or at least exhibit a willingness to perpetuate them online. People bring prior interaction patterns to digital milieus, as renowned linguist and communication scholar Susan Herring observed. She studied gendered forms of aggressive argumentation and personal attacks, or “flaming,” in an online professional linguistics forum in the 1990s.60 She found that males exhibited more aggressive styles and were easily identified as men by community members, even when they pretended to be women. Elaborate identity ruses are increasingly difficult to maintain over time.
People post anonymously online every day without spouting hate simply because they can (try to) do so anonymously. For instance, in a study of politically themed Usenet groups discussing inflammatory subjects such as gun control and racism, communication scholar Zizi Papacharissi found that anonymity used for impoliteness was not the norm, thus dismantling the technologically deterministic view of mediated anonymity as inevitably problematic.61 Discussants in the study often apologized or expressed regret when discussions veered out of control.
Numerous studies demonstrate that anonymity is not the leading offender in many contexts. Writing from the field of political communication, Myiah Hutchens and her colleagues drew on surveys of undergraduates and people who frequent political blogs to analyze flaming intentions, where flaming is defined as hurtful personal attacks. Within the student sample they found that “contrary to prior research, anonymity was not a significant predictor of flaming intention.”62 Instead, the researchers noted that individuals tended to respond with hostility when their political beliefs were challenged. For the study on blog users, anonymity only increased people’s disposition to flame when their views received indirect challenges. The researchers concluded that local norms in digital environments significantly shaped flaming behaviors. Types of activity (such as intense political discussions) and media dispositions (such as seeing flaming as acceptable) were more predictive of flaming than anonymity.
Conversely, in the present random sample, most of the constructive, interactive comments came from commenters who were anonymous to me. All but two of the constructive comments came from posters whom I had never (knowingly) met. Just because commenters were anonymous to me does not guarantee that I was anonymous to them—indeed anonymity works two ways. Given that the majority of positive commentary came from anonymous posters, it becomes difficult to support the claim that anonymity is the main culprit behind degraded online interaction. Why do concerned citizens never propose that anonymity should be encouraged, whenever anonymous positive discourse appears? Reversing the standard proposition reveals the problematics of focusing on anonymity rather than dealing with underlying societal prejudices and creating useful pedagogical strategies that could improve participatory literacies.
When aggressive commentary meets standard definitions of harassment, it should be dealt with accordingly, involving legal entities as necessary. However, in many gray areas one person’s “hater” comment is another person’s blunt critique. A harsh comment for some might seem to others to be a legitimate means of self-expression and knowledge exchange. Consider whether the following comment posted by truesign constitutes hating:
horse [biscuits]!! its [sic] just video made by people who want to get noticed or become famous most of the videos are lame if it got rid of the crap it might be something but right now it crap.too many idiots no content. sad sad sad.63
Truesign’s comment is strongly (and awkwardly) worded and contains the word “crap” twice. YouTube is seen as “lame” and exhibiting “no content” because it is filled with “too many idiots.” The comment echoes often-heard popular and scholarly claims that people use YouTube and tropes of community to “get noticed or become famous.” Assessing hater commentary can be subjective, and opinions may change according to who is posting, viewing, or coding the commentary.64 Yet categorizations are crucial given that appropriate solutions depend on understanding the types of violations that cause individuals harm.
Anonymity is often conflated with accountability, which are two different concepts. The argument goes that because online interaction is anonymous, it is mean-spirited and will meet with no consequences. Precisely speaking, this is an overgeneralization. It is possible to be anonymous in terms of withholding personal information from one’s general audience, yet still have one’s comments blocked by a fellow YouTuber. One’s account might be closed for violating the terms of service. One can be relatively anonymous but still experience consequences. Conversely, criminal acts occurring in person, such as illegal police brutality, may result in no legal consequences, even when perpetrators’ identities are known and widely publicized.
When individuals exhibit persistent, identifiable behaviors across the same account names or nicknames online, they become pseudonymous rather than completely anonymous.65 Over time it may become relevant and desirable for administrators to marshal resources to trace and block pseudonymous users’ IP addresses. In some cases, “digital detective work” such as issuing subpoenas to obtain IP addresses from website operators and service providers have identified harassers.66 Administrators may complicate perpetrators’ ability to be repeat offenders.67 It is important to analytically tease apart anonymity—or rather pseudonymity—from accountability. Although there is a relationship, they are not isomorphic.
Even when measures are introduced to ostensibly reduce anonymity, comment cordiality does not automatically improve. Reagle discusses an initiative in which the social media platform of Google+ was integrated into YouTube in 2013, yet was quickly removed in 2015 due to uproar from users.68 The idea behind the integration was to reduce anonymity, since comments would be linked to an “identifiable Google+ profile” with a user’s supposed official name.69 A result of this integration was that trolls and spammers continued their work. Further, the move alienated many legitimate social media users who had “relied on pseudonymity for safety” due to unfortunate circumstances, such as being harassed by stalkers.70
Hundreds of thousands of users reportedly signed petitions in protest,71 and YouTube cofounder Jawed Karim angrily wondered, “Why the fuck do I need a google+ account to comment on a video?”72 Online participation includes a balance of features and functionality, including protecting privacy. People may not wish to be forced into interaction that is mandated to reduce anonymity. Ostensibly such moves are about improving commentary, but they arguably facilitate more targeted advertising. Reducing anonymity is often pitched for cordiality but is used by corporations to track consistent consumer patterns.
Removing (assumed) anonymity is not necessarily an acceptable solution in all civic contexts. Lovink argues that people may fight for a “right to anonymity.”73 For example, journalists have maintained a right to protect anonymous sources so that the weak can expose corruption among the powerful. Lovink provides an interesting thought experiment by asking, what would happen if all of our voting decisions were made public? It is one thing to disclose information about our politics on social media voluntarily; it is quite another to have our voting record immediately available for coworkers and employers to judge our professional merit on the basis of our politics. A certain amount of anonymity is healthy in particular contexts.
Despite the fact that online anonymity has now been “effectively destroyed” through technological tracing mechanisms, Lovink argues that “the vast majority of the internet population still considers the internet a free-for-all playground where you can say anything you like.”74 In a study of social media across the world, anthropologist Daniel Miller and his colleagues concluded that “with regard to social media, the issue of anonymity has reversed into a concern over lack of privacy.”75 Although the prevailing folk assumption is that harassment is always anonymous, in fact people routinely reveal their prejudices and biases using their official names. Examples abound in which people nonanonymously engage in incendiary online interaction,76 with offenders of violent threats sometimes having a traceable, public history of violence offline as well.77 As Reagle observes, people may be surprised to learn that “embarrassing” and “nasty” comments are frequently “made in the open and beyond the cover of anonymity.”78
If we apply a temporal lens, it is clear that anonymity is not a steady state. It can be reduced or removed in particular circumstances. Whether people in a given encounter will work to reduce mutual anonymity depends upon whether it is relevant to do so, whether they have a strong enough desire to go through the process, and whether they have the appropriate resources to track down a commenter’s identity information. For example, how much does one need to know the official name or home address of a commenter who contributes interesting critiques or who provides anonymous help through a digital service? There is no relevance or desire to obtain this information in casual discourse. In the case of harassment, it is obviously relevant and desirable to track down perpetrators and bring them to justice.
Over time, one’s interlocutors become more familiar as they exhibit behavioral patterns using the same pseudonym. Identifiable traits include consistent speech habits, preferred modes of interaction, and repeated engagement with specific discussion topics.79 In my video I noted two cases of hater commenters that provided clues about their personality, even though I did not know them personally. Leaving such digital footprints means that even the most secretive anonymous interactants—even hackers—may end up being publicly identified,80 especially when, as I suggest, there is sufficient relevance, resources, and desire to do so.
All of the hater commenters were anonymous to me in that I had never knowingly met them. Two commenters—microwavefishsticks and teddieppl77—exhibited hate and behavioral regularities across their comments. Their commentary was similar in that it was filled with mean-spirited forms of hate and prejudices. Microwavefishsticks appeared twice in the random sample with this kind of commentary:
The best communities are the ones with every asshole on the planet coming together. Jews, blacks, mexicans, racists, homos, whites, haters, lovers, retards, scholars, assholes, truck drivers, circus freeks [sic]. This is just a bunch of fat boring white trash telling everyone they should be like them.
Fuck you
Similarly, teddieppl77 also appeared twice in the random sample, contributing this comment: “See no one likes to look at fat ppl. If you are fat I want you to know that, I am one of the ppl that laugh at you as you jiggle by.”
Examining their commentary in the random sample yields a prediction that their commentary across the entire corpus of comments posted to the video would contain similarly hateful and prejudiced comments. These predictions were confirmed. In the entire corpus of 1,906 comments posted to the video, microwavefishsticks contributed a total of 43 comments, of which 40 (93 percent) qualified as hater commentary because it contained profanity, misogyny, and other prejudices. This behavior pattern was remarkably consistent across this commenter’s participation in the video discussion. Although I do not know the person’s official name, I know that microwavefishsticks posts hater messages in a public forum and that their commentary formed at least 2 percent of the total comments.
Examining the commentary of teddieppl77 yielded a similar result. Teddieppl77 contributed a total of 101 comments to the video, of which 83 percent were hater comments; 42 percent of his remarks commented on weight. Teddieppl77’s commentary was also remarkably consistent, often engaging in petty battles with other commenters and routinely expressing a rejection of “fat people.” Elsewhere teddieppl77 claims to be an “Aussie.” Although I do not “know” these posters, their behavior patterns were consistent across the entire corpus of comments, which provided identification clues.81
A crucial question is, how did anonymity impact constructive commentary? Although haters were anonymous to me, so too were the people who contributed positive commentary. Anonymity was not a useful predictor of problematic commentary in the random sample. In fact, anonymous posters were the key drivers of constructive commentary in the discourse. Such findings complicate the mythos that anonymity is principally the problem in galvanizing support for public anthropology and stakeholder-driven “para-ethnographies.”
The flip side of the assumption that anonymity creates agonism is that knowing one’s interlocutors guarantees in-depth dialogue. Yet the study results did not confirm this assumption. Very few of my online acquaintances posted comments. I personally knew two commenters from the random sample who posted comments. I greatly appreciated their support, but the comments did not advance the discussion by engaging with content. One comment came from an acquaintance whom I had met in the video blogging community outside of YouTube; it read: “congrats, this is awesome!!!” Presumably the congratulations had to do with being featured on the YouTube welcome page. The other was a comment from someone whom I had interviewed in San Francisco. This comment was part of a thread in which the commenter argued with another commenter who had posted insulting remarks. Although I appreciated that the commenter tackled a hater in my defense, the comment did not engage with the video’s content. The reality is that knowing the identities of commenters did not guarantee their interactive engagement with the video’s central subject.
Conversely, identities are not fully revealed, even in person. When interacting with others, what we know (or what we think we know) about people only has a probabilistic likelihood of being correct.82 We may assume we know people when we meet them in person, but our confidence may be misplaced through interpretive arrogance or because a situation is complicated. Consider the Olympian Bruce Jenner, a transgender female. For years, people who interacted with her in person (including her most intimate family members) assumed she saw herself as a man.83 These observers may have felt 100 percent sure that their assessment was correct. These same people would have been 100 percent wrong. Her childhood experiences, lifelong cross-dressing, and transition to being a woman called Caitlyn suggest, as was demonstrated in sociological research back in the 1960s,84 that our assumptions about people in person are nowhere near foolproof.
This study argues that it is time to move beyond the obsession with anonymity for understanding online dynamics.85 Anonymity, or at least partial anonymity, is part of daily life. When we engage in civic discussions, we need rhetorical skills to persuade publics who are largely unknown to us.86 Further, it can be just as important for digital ethnographic research to cultivate “weak ties,” as discussed by sociologist Mark Granovetter.87 Weak ties may exhibit a low investment in time and energy with an ethnographer or within a specific ethnographic project, but such participants nevertheless help the ethnographer cultivate information from a “vast knowledge space.”88
Unless we are content to persuade only our close family and friends about important social issues, we will need to connect with and convince people largely unknown to us regarding issues of civic concern. Notably, more research is needed to understand how anonymity encourages people to speak out, particularly on sensitive or controversial topics. It is also important to focus on supporting those who are being harmed rather than only on transgressors.89 We need to refocus the dialogue away from overemphasis on anonymity, which in any event is becoming difficult to guarantee in digital spaces and is a poor predictor of commentary’s usefulness. We need to intensify peer mentorship and deploy social and technical solutions that redirect public dialogue in productive directions.
Expectations for Commentary and Next Steps
Much has been written about the paucity of engagement with serious topics on YouTube. Researchers have understandably expressed skepticism about the prospects for online information sharing and sincere discussion on video sites, especially given their propensity to exhibit hurtful and off-topic commentary.90 I share concerns about whether it makes sense to try these dialogic, public engagements. However, assessments of online commentary are often limited to structural considerations, often without considering key factors that may influence a video’s reception, such as whether the content actually addresses viewers’ concerns. For example, one study examined commentary on a public service announcement posted to YouTube, which aimed to discourage teens from smoking marijuana.91 The study focused on ludic comments that did not appear to take the warning seriously. Although the study acknowledged some of the positive commentary and debate that the video generated, it ultimately concluded that YouTube’s playful atmosphere forecloses the entire site from having any prospects for public deliberation.
Notably, the study did not consider additional factors, such as whether teens find this topic necessary for a public service announcement. Nearly half of the US population now supports legalization of marijuana for recreational use.92 Studies criticizing YouTube’s potential often focus on the negative comments in a “glass half empty” way rather than building on the engaged participation that frequently appears in research studies of commentary.
The present findings exhibit patterns more similar to those in a study investigating the prospects for civic engagement on YouTube in the environmental realm. In an analysis of comments posted to a climate change activism video called War on Capitalism, researchers noted that approximately 30 percent of the comments were isolated rather than threaded and 20 percent contained abusive language such as “I hope you fucking die!”93 However, the researchers observed that most of the commentary appeared within threads of conversation; even some of the hostile comments engaged in reciprocal dialogue. Researchers discounted concerns about the site’s structural limitations, such as the limited numbers of characters allowed in individual postings, principally because they observed workarounds that bypassed these limits. Social media participants might break their posts into several comments to relay their point.94 The researchers concluded that, although the discussions did not conform to idealized Habermasian debate, such comments served a civic function. Even hostility could lead to reciprocal and interactive engagement.
Pundits have observed that when one engages large publics with any kind of material, one usually encounters the “30 percent rule”: roughly 30 percent of the viewers will love the work, 30 percent will hate it, and about 30 percent will be indifferent.95 Intriguingly, the numbers presented by the War on Capitalism comment study and the present analysis show a breakdown that is not far from these heuristics in terms of content interactivity (36 percent) and hatery (26 percent). Whether such observations are consistent across diverse sets of video commentary is an empirical question. The point is that one should probably expect to receive large numbers of detractors when engaging with very large and disparate public audiences. Notably, at least some proportion of commenters will also likely engage with the material, other YouTube participants, the video maker, or all of these.
One solution involves taking active steps to redress hate speech. Writing from the perspective of improving internet safety, journalist Courtney Radsch investigated female journalists’ responses to online misogyny.96 While some women responded by “letting it go,” others took active approaches that included taking screenshots and reporting abuse (the “name and shame” approach). Documenting and publicly shaming abusers helped some female journalists to deal with harassment on personal as well as professional levels. In one instance an Australian journalist discovered that her harassers on Facebook were children. She accessed their mothers’ profiles and sent them screenshots of their children’s posts. She even received an apology letter from one of the children. Radsch offers solutions for changing commenter behavior. An example might include having people go through training programs before being allowed on social media. She proposes “shifting cultural norms so that such attacks become unacceptable.”97 Radsch’s “multifaceted” solutions and analytical energy focus on recognizing and changing participatory problems.
Comment moderation has been a long-standing tactic in online environments, as was illustrated by the reflections of one attendee at a New York City gathering in 2007. He officially refers to himself as Mike Street on YouTube; he is the creator of the blog GreasyGuide.com as well as Smart Brown Voices, a podcast that invites listeners to “Learn from Successful Black and Latino Startup Founders, Entrepreneurs, Activists, Marketers and Creatives.”
Mike Street was a black man approximately in his late twenties. His videos included vlogs, interviews with black celebrities, gaming content, and social issues, such as tax hikes and voting. As of July 2018, he had 571 subscribers and his videos often garner thousands of views each. A very early adopter, he joined YouTube in December 2005, just as it became available to the public. Characterized on his podcast as a “social media nerd” and “technology activist,” he had served as a community manager for online sites. A decade later he worked in social media, marketing, and media consulting.
Mike felt that YouTube should increase its vigilance in removing inappropriate commentary. In my vlog YouTube Your Way, posted on October 2, 2007, his interview responses articulated the often-heard criticism of YouTube as a “free-for-all.”98 He believed the site should provide a more participatory atmosphere, at a minimum using automated “filters” to deal with unacceptably inappropriate commentary. Mike believed it was important to keep a site’s tone positive. His practice was to remove any comment that was “sexist, racist, or homophobic.” He stressed that people should express their opinion—until they cross a participatory line.
Several solutions have been suggested to deal with YouTube’s problematic commentary. One proposal involves reputation systems that rate commenters to reduce negative behavior patterns. YouTube instituted a commenter rating system that enabled viewers to rate a comment as thumbs up or down. The system identifies “top comments,” ostensibly to prioritize those that achieve high ratings and numerous comment responses. However, the up-down comment rating is perceived as a rather crude mechanism. Similar to Mike Street’s suggestion, in 2013 YouTube instituted a “blacklisting” feature that enabled creators to review posts with certain words before they were posted.99 In 2016 YouTube instituted mechanisms such as moderators and algorithms to detect inappropriate comments and to hold them for review.100 Identifying a convenient formula for dealing with these issues will be difficult. Decisions about how to deal with haters vary by situation and individual disposition, and a valid choice may be to take a break or cease interaction when hate-filled commentary becomes overwhelming.
A more extreme solution involves disabling commentary altogether. In examining online discourse from a communication studies perspective, Joseph Reagle observed patterned cycles of comment inclusion and exclusion. Prominent bloggers, fed up with comment abuse, disabled comment features on their sites. However, after protests from viewers, comments became re-enabled along with technical or social features to deal with negative commentary. This approach is said to be like “cultivating a garden” in that if the weeds are pruned, “flowers will begin to grow.”101 Reagle’s observations are particularly interesting, as they illustrate what Lefebvre identified as important, cyclical behavior that reveals cultural patterns and values. Digital sites see initial enthusiasm and growth of comments, and then face decline and death when comments are disabled. In answer to his book’s final question about whether commentary is ultimately worth it, Reagle concluded, “Comment is a characteristic of contemporary life,” and given that commentary is here to stay, “we must find ways to use it effectively.”102 To improve the quality of interactivity, he advocates cultivating “comment communities,” in part by reading, acknowledging, and finding ways to deal with the comments “at the bottom of the Web.”
YouTubers’ Video Meditations on Community
If we apply Lefebvre’s rubric, it is clear that YouTube’s community operated in linear and cyclical ways, depending on levels of analysis under study. It functioned in a linear sense when examined at the scale of analysis within a particular group. Participation developed and intensified over the course of a couple of years in a linear trajectory from inception to decline. Yet it was also apparent that community took on a cyclical quality when analyzed across the website. As newcomers arrived, some of them began to use the site interactively in their social circles and explored possibilities for achieving community.
Community continues to be a popular topic on YouTube. In June 2018 a search for the term “YouTube community” revealed tens of thousands of videos. In addition to interviews and comments, the third line of evidence examined in this chapter concerns analyzing how YouTubers discuss community in their own videos. When they speculate on its prospects, they are arguably conceptualizing YouTube as a perceived social space rather than only a website or service. Videos that address the topic reveal disagreements between supporters and skeptics. Opinions are expressed again as new media generations appear on YouTube. In a video entitled Little Youtube #community, a white transgender video maker in her early twenties whose YouTube channel name was OneTakeAsh referenced the gratitude she felt toward popular video makers who supported her when she was a “little YouTuber” with a mere 200 subscribers.103 As of June 2018, she had 435,617 subscribers. OneTakeAsh’s videos regularly saw several thousand views each. She vlogs on subjects such as gender, white male privilege, contemplating top surgery, and her relationships. Her video about YouTube community was posted on August 10, 2014, nearly five years after she joined the site.
In the video she reveals that when her channel amassed 10,000 subscribers, she felt deeply appreciative of those popular YouTubers who had helped her. She also sought to do “collabs” with “little Youtubers” who demonstrated a genuine interest in community. She characterized the work of many “big YouTubers” as predictable, formulaic, less interesting, and less authentic to watch. YouTubers, including young people like herself, expressed interest in collaborating in social ways and cultivating lesser-known voices.
Conversely, videos on the site also explore complications for engaging with a community. In a video posted on December 13, 2014, called THE YOUTUBE COMMUNITY SUCKS!?, a popular YouTuber whose channel name is BRITTNEYLEESAUNDERS (also her official name) admits that it would be great if the site were more “tight knit” and more people were “friends.” At the time of the video’s posting, she had been participating on the site for over three years. Brittney was an Australian woman in her early twenties whose videos revolved around subjects such as makeup, answering viewers’ questions about her, Australians trying foods, and YouTube characteristics. Her topics appear to garner widespread viewership and monetization. In one video she notes that she would be open to acting professionally. Her videos typically saw hundreds of thousands of views each. As of June 2018, she had over 1 million subscribers. Brittney argues that people are embroiled in a “competition” for attention and, presumably, advertising revenue from ads placed on videos. She describes a tension that surfaces on platforms that simultaneously encourage sociality and self-promotion.
Videos such as these prototypically reflect the discourse that YouTubers engage in when trying to make sense of their mediated social formation. Videos on community continue to appear from YouTubers of different eras. Over a decade after the site’s launch, creators are still discussing prospects for community on YouTube. The recurrence of discussions about community demonstrates that the concept remains open to negotiation as each media generation arrives and must collectively assess its merits and possibilities as a meaningful interactive frame.
Learning by Going “Viral”
Lessons for the future may be drawn from the present exercise as well as past experiments with YouTube pedagogy. Participating on YouTube as a video maker, sharing one’s research publicly, and collecting data through commentary are exercises that lie at the intersection of research and experimental pedagogy. Lessons learned from varied levels of participation across different projects must be examined to see how attempts at public pedagogy might be shaped. Sites that follow video traffic maintain that educational videos rank among the top ten most popular videos on YouTube. Key to their success is serving children and college students, providing up-to-date information, and grappling with complex issues.104
Efforts to share research with the people that one studies using visual means is part of a long scholarly tradition in visual anthropology. Anthropologist Jean Rouch posited the idea of a “shared anthropology” that would include screening one’s work with community insiders with whom a researcher hoped to engage.105 However, creating digital materials while drawing on visual anthropology insights is still a relatively new field. Anthropologist Sarah Pink argues that “although the number of practitioners of this type of digital visual anthropology is steadily increasing, as yet it is the domain of a narrow group.”106
Pink highlights early pioneers working at the intersection of digital and visual anthropology.107 She references the work of Peter Biella, Napoleon Chagnon, and Gary Seaman, who created the Yanomamö Interactive CD-ROM project in 1997, as well as the visual anthropology of Jay Ruby, who established a website and welcomed contributions from the people in his ethnographic study of Oak Park, Illinois. In 2018, anthropologist Robert Lemelson and a team at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) released Tajen: Interactive, a web documentary that uses multiple senses to explore ritual and emotional aspects of contemporary Balinese cockfighting, thus supplementing Clifford Geertz’s classic work.108 Numerous educational videos have appeared on YouTube from countless institutions. Notable examples are the videos from the Why We Post (2016–2018) global social media project run by anthropologist Daniel Miller at University College London (UCL). However, the UCL researchers do not study YouTube; they use it to post information about their research results about other media.109 The present work showed advantages and challenges of collecting data by discussing the same site on which one is participating. Collecting data as well as sharing anthropological research enabled forms of “para-ethnography” in which stakeholders were interpellated into a collective discussion that drew on multiple levels and types of expertise rather than only on those of the professor or facilitator.
Media scholar Alexandra Juhasz launched a well-publicized experiment by teaching a class called Learning from YouTube directly on the site in 2007. All of the students’ assignments were constructed as YouTube videos or comments. Class sessions were recorded and posted to the site, and a press release was issued, thus opening the classroom to the general public.110 Such exercises take on a self-reflexive quality. The course and the experience of learning online morphed into the mediated phenomena that the class was exploring.111
Similar to the present study, Juhasz reports that the scale of commentary was exhausting to deal with and students were mocked. Ultimately, the poor quality of videos and comments, lack of technical features to link materials to the discussion, commercial influences, and time demands on the students and the professor led Juhasz to conclude, “YouTube is not made for higher education, nor should it be.”112 Collectively, our studies suggest that scale is a crucial factor. Aiming for more circumspect audiences may be easier to handle in terms of tailoring content and dealing with feedback. Clearly, teaching directly on YouTube exhibits considerable challenges. Individual educators must decide how much they will tackle, and it is a legitimate decision to forgo public engagement.
Notably, Juhasz also observed that students learned from the experiment, including crucial meta-lessons about what and how students learn, especially within the parameters of specific technical infrastructures. By participating on YouTube despite its challenges, it is possible to understand how people learn by exchanging commentary, not only with the video maker/scholar but with other commenters. Future video-sharing platforms might address these limitations by being more nimble in providing access to information as a connected exchange is unfolding. Commenters in the present study at times invoked scholarly sources to support their arguments, suggesting that access to informational links could raise the bar in interactive discussions.
Anthropologist Michael Wesch also participated in experimental video pedagogy by posting an original video of his, called The Machine Is Us/ing Us, on March 8, 2007. The video went “viral” and had accumulated over 1.7 million views as of June 2018. The video argues that “with no code to learn, any person can create and organize information and thus, ‘teach the machine.’ In turn, the machine uses people to create links between different information streams and between its users.”113 In addition, Wesch launched a highly lauded Digital Ethnography project, which includes videos, lectures, and publications to explore the relationships between culture, technology, and education.
Wesch learned much from his digital experiences that might help craft future approaches.114 He discovered that it was possible for an academic without professional training in filmmaking to collaborate with others and to reach millions of people. He learned that it was possible not only to reach fellow anthropologists but also to cross disciplinary boundaries. Despite the fact that the experience was generally positive, Wesch remains circumspect about unbridled use of technology in the classroom. Recent works focus on thinking more fundamentally about the relationship between teachers and students. According to Wesch, “The real secret of great teaching” and a “force more powerful and disruptive than any technology” is “love.”115
Similar in spirit to the present study, Wesch advocates creating what Parker J. Palmer has called a “community of truth,”116 in which the professor is not the final authority of objective facts in more interpretive fields but rather students and teachers interactively and dynamically collaborate in an ongoing search for knowledge to foster “openness to the world, to each other, and to difference.”117 While continuing to explore digital tools, Wesch’s work focuses on interpersonal, pedagogical philosophies for inspiration. Models based on communities of truth are appealing for pedagogical experimentation as researchers, educators, and the general public may work together to create shared environments that facilitate interaction and information exchange.
Not all participation can be fully controlled, as when one’s work goes viral. Even when networked projects are designed to scale, they always have the potential to reach—for better or worse—far larger audiences, as Wesch and I experienced. Approaching the topic from an information studies perspective, Karine Nahon and Jeff Hemsley argue that quality and professional training are not necessarily benchmarks for virality if a work has salience or personal emotional resonance for people sharing it.118 The term “viral” connotes an artifact’s rapid spread and reach across a critical mass of individual viewers and varied networks. Nahon and Hemsley define virality as “a social information flow process where many people simultaneously forward a specific information item, over a short period of time, within their social networks, and where the message spreads beyond their own [social] networks to different, often distant networks, resulting in a sharp acceleration in the number of people who are exposed to the message.”119 Some scholars object to this term because the definition of “viral” is variable and carries a connotation of illness. Writing from the perspective of media studies, Jenkins, Ford, and Green prefer the term “spreadable.”120
What Defines a Community? received many more views and comments within a few days than did any of my other videos. Whether the views were generated in a top-down “broadcast” way because people watched it as soon as they encountered it on YouTube’s welcome page or whether it received a viral “bottom-up” surge from rapid sharing is impossible to know. YouTube was not yet collecting information on sharing metrics at the time of the video. Nahon and Hemsley argue that it is difficult to achieve a wide audience through top-down promotion alone,121 suggesting that my video saw at least some views through bottom-up sharing.
Nahon and Hemsley state that artifacts such as videos may constitute an individual viral event but that a particular discourse may also go viral, giving rise to “viral topics.”122 In viral topics, subjects of interest become part of a larger “mediated conversation” with many different artifacts playing a role. The subject of community received a great deal of attention on the site. My video was clearly part of a larger viral topic of interest—one that provided a prime opportunity to engage with a broader public while collecting data.
In contrast to previous, bold experimentation, my project modestly aimed to see if publicly circulating a scholarly video or “open video field note” and sharing findings-in-progress might stimulate discussion about classical anthropological concepts as they applied in mediated environments. Instead of considering traditional and online educational forms as oppositional, this approach is commensurate with discovering new ways to create more open classroom connections in which learning may occur in fluid ways such that researchers and audiences work toward creating a knowledge-based, ethically grounded “community of truth.”123
Creating connections not only imparts information about content through videos, but as Juhasz demonstrated, students may viscerally experience meta-lessons about how they learn in technologized ways. In line with de Seta’s dialogical approach, discourse posted to any single video should be considered merely an opening volley in a series of exchanges between scholars and audiences. Rather than adjudicate a definitive answer to the query on what defines a community, this chapter argued that it is far more productive to keep asking the question.
Community as Processual
Most interviewees believed that under the right circumstances, YouTube could facilitate community—often in spite of its commercialized infrastructure. YouTubers’ reasons for envisioning the site as a potential springboard for community were broad and diverse. This project adds to the anthropological record by investigating how their definitions mapped to scholarly conceptions. Drawing from ethnographic data, the study found that community was discursively perceived as a process, one that must be negotiated through discourse as well as through participation in co-temporally shared moments of interaction. Processes of community building stem from discussing and debating what constitutes meaningful community in specific milieus.
YouTube is often dismissed as incapable of offering meaningful interaction, and vernacular videos and comments are judged harshly. In fact, there are videos of high quality on the site that are not necessarily made by professionals. Part of the problem involves finding videos that are not being promoted or featured on YouTube but that have meaning to audiences even if their quality is not at the highest standard. Michael Newman, a scholar in journalism and mass communication, argues, “No longer is professionalism assumed to be the norm and standard of quality. The notion that do-it-yourself amateurism can stand on equal ground with media industry professionalism signals a democratic challenge to hierarchies of aesthetic value.”124 In her research on viral music videos, film and media studies scholar Carol Vernallis, who is often dismayed by the site’s video quality, also observes that many of her students create impressive videos, even using modest tools, and they receive upward of 1,000 views.125 Vernallis’s findings suggest that creative energies could be harnessed for establishing connected forms of learning through grassroots media—as long as the topic sparked meaningful engagement.
A thriving discourse of community continues to appear in YouTube videos and comments.126 My video served as a form of “para-ethnography” in which viewers interpellated themselves as stakeholders into a discussion about community formation. Videos and other artifacts offer moments of reflection on topics that require ongoing negotiation. Although researchers have long known that communities can spring from digital milieus, it is not a given that a particular group of creators operating within a specific combination of techno-cultural circumstances will agree that the platform inspires that level of bonding.
If community is processual, then it will require spaces and platforms to negotiate its development and maintenance. Wesch’s references to “communities of truth” are appealing in this context because they collaboratively involve students in identifying high-quality material that students might create. Participating in video-sharing sites will likely require more energy rather than disengagement or comment closures. As a future blueprint, designers and automated algorithms might deploy ways of identifying comments that productively contribute to discourse and build on them.
The title of this chapter has a double meaning in that it refers to the title of my video and to the underlying theoretical inquiry that inspired it. Students often wonder why scholars try to define intellectually slippery terms such as “community.” If the term has so many connotations, surely a conclusive definition cannot be achieved in a few classroom sessions in a semester or even across a particular scholar’s career. Indeed, even within anthropology, scholars such as John Postill tend to reject the term, citing its connotations of homogeneity, elision of conflict, and lack of dynamism as key factors in its uncertain usefulness for scholarship on mediation.127 John Postill and Sarah Pink draw on the work of fellow anthropologists Nigel Rapport and Vered Amit to argue that many of the situations they study in digital contexts “are neither communities nor networks—they are hybrid forms of sociality through which the ethnographer and their research participants gain variously mediated senses of contextual fellowship.”128
Yet numerous arguments exist that it is important to retain the concept of “community” where applicable for intellectual and practical reasons. First, it is important to avoid complacency and exercise the mind by discussing and debating historically important terms. Second, not all terms are interchangeable with community. Amit argues that the egocentric bias of personal networks does not necessarily guarantee the formation of warm, interpersonal, and interconnected feelings of reciprocity, sharing, and responsibility that the term community at root connotes.129 Third, the term community is clearly emotionally laden and continues to resonate with people other than scholars, as evidenced by the fact that so many YouTubers discuss it passionately in their videos and comments as well as in research interviews.
A term that continues to widely resonate emotionally is worthy of study. As Amit suggests, community must still “mean” something, as it offers “substantive referents for a sufficient number of people or it wouldn’t continue to be enlisted for so many causes.”130 Finally, from a practical perspective, such communities—which have also been called “communities of sentiment” or “communities of interest”—have civic possibilities.131 Explicitly or latently, they may move individuals from experiencing “shared imagination to collective action.”132 Given that so much of human sociality has moved to mediated sites that contain political and commercial agendas, it is imperative that discussions about sociality and the desired platforms that are required to support it are recognized and encouraged. Groups of people who perceive themselves to be creating communities may be mobilized for important causes that aim to improve equality and social justice.
Conversely, it is important not to overly idealize the term. Communities can also be stifling and limiting, and therefore their support must always be subject to the will of those who wish to participate within their parameters.133 Rapport argues that
a notion of cultural holism needs to be replaced with a “processual view of culture,” as something in the making, existing in its use, whereby social milieux are neither internally coherent (and prone to addition) nor clearly bounded. Inasmuch as community exists it is a matter of an ongoing negotiating of commonality, working through division and disagreement, risking divergence as much as sharing, and likely to mobilize fracture and severance as much as belonging.134
In the popular imagination community connotes a warm and embracing environment. But individual experiences show, as did those of YouTubers, that working through division and controversy is an active process that requires investment from stakeholders to make community viable.
Taking a Lefebvrian view, my study revealed community dynamics to be linear when seen at the scale of analysis of the social group under study, and cyclical when viewed from the perspective of the website, in which discourses of community appear in waves over time. The reason community appears in so many digital ethnographies—and will likely continue to do so—is partly because as each social formation on a new medium finds itself growing closer, it is faced with the possibility of social bonding, potentially to the point of achieving community. A key part of this bonding often includes experiencing shared happenings at the same time, especially through media. Yet not all participants are able to accept or even recognize the possibilities of community at the same time. Thus, the process requires using discourse to grapple with whether community is an appropriate characterization of participants’ experiences. While interviewees largely had arrived at a moment of acceptance, commenters displayed diverse and even suspicious views about its desirability. Lefebvre’s model provides insight into the temporal dynamics of this process. His categorization of arrhythmic participation manifested on YouTube as people came to understand the presence of community at different participatory rates. Maintaining intensely diverse views on community’s feasibility at different times complicated its widespread and sustained uptake on YouTube.
Discourse takes a central position as groups work toward achieving what they believe to be a form of community. Recognizing these recurring patterns facilitates open discussion about how collective digital scholarship should proceed, and calls for collaborative projects in which scholars assist stakeholders, where appropriate, in productively engaging in discourse required to achieve their social goals. If community is more of a rhetorical and participatory process than a bounded entity, creating platforms that enable discussion of formative communal groups and their infrastructural requirements will be of vital importance.
The study’s findings suggest that community is a process, not a static element, in which people negotiate its parameters and decide whether they will continue to participate in a communal configuration. Lovink points out that a major problem with online commentary is that “there is a widespread unwillingness to reach consensus and to come to a conclusion in a debate.”135 To some extent this may indeed be a problem in forums grappling with pressing issues requiring much-needed solutions. But in terms of community, it is arguably the case that arriving at a definitive answer may be more isolating and disenfranchising than allowing a space for the discussion to continue. The anthropological concept of community retains vitality, but it will only persist as a mediated, social formation to the extent that people want it—and have an appropriate forum to discuss what it is or could be.