Notes
Chapter 1: Introduction
1. Kirkpatrick 2007.
2. Kirkpatrick 2007.
3. O’Neill 2012.
4. YouTube changed its policy such that a channel would need 10,000 overall lifetime views in order to add advertisements and share in a video’s advertising revenue. The move reportedly aimed to restrict channels that pirated material in an attempt to monetize. See Spangler 2017.
5. Under the rules established in early 2018, creators needed 4,000 hours of viewing within the past year as well as a minimum of 1,000 subscribers to their channel to qualify for partnership. See Levin 2018.
6. Appadurai [1990] 2006, 584–603.
7. Lange 2008a.
8. For more details see Lange 2015b.
9. YouTube’s openness in accommodating vernacular and professional works encouraged diverse forms of participation. See Burgess and Green 2009.
10. Lipton 2014.
11. Warman 2012.
12. Warman 2013.
13. Nicas 2017.
14. Nicas 2017.
15. Warman 2013
16. Anderson 2015.
17. Jenkins 2009b, 187–212.
18. Burgess and Green 2009.
19. Clifford 1986, 1–26.
20. Driscoll and Paloque-Berges 2017.
21. The term was reportedly coined by the Portuguese writer Lucio Alberto Pinheiro dos Santos and adapted by Henri Lefebvre. See Lefebvre 2004, xiii and 9.
22. See Horton 2005, 157–159.
23. See Lee 2017.
24. Lefebvre 2004, 15.
25. Lefebvre 2004, 15.
26. Gingrich, Ochs, and Swedlund 2002, S3.
27. For example, MySpace was launched in 2003 but was superseded in popularity in 2010 by Facebook. See Gehl 2012.
28. Lefebvre 2004.
29. Burgess and Green 2009.
30. Kavoori 2011. Kavoori notes that close readings and proposed taxonomies of selected videos represent one particular “cut” or what Clifford would call a “partial view” of YouTube.
31. Strangelove 2010.
32. Strangelove 2010, 47.
33. For example, earlier digital ethnographers used participatory approaches to study MUDs, or multi-user domains, which were text-based games that technologists and others played online. Examples include Turkle 1984; Cherny 1999; Baym 2000; Kendall 2002; and Lange 2003.
34. Pink 2011.
35. Ruby and Chalfen 1974.
36. Morphy and Banks 1997.
37. Ruby 1991.
38. Lutkehaus and Cool 1999, 118.
39. Principal recording for the film occurred between 2007 and 2009. The film was screened in 2014 in Paris at Ethnografilm, a film festival that showcases the work of ethnographers and anthropologists that visually depict social worlds.
40. For ethnography on social media use outside of the United States, see the research project led by Daniel Miller at University College London called Why We Post. The research offers comparative insights through several publications about social media such as Facebook and Twitter in countries such as China, Brazil, Turkey, Chile, India, England, Italy, and Trinidad. See https://www.ucl.ac.uk/why-we-post.
41. Gielen 2015.
42. According to Wesch, 34.5 percent of total uploads came from the United States in 2008, followed by the UK at 6.9 percent and the Philippines at 3.9 percent. See Wesch 2008. Pundits similarly observed that from 2005 to 2010, the single country with the most uploads and viewers was the United States. See Geraldes 2010.
43. Basu 2010.
44. Statista Research Department 2016.
45. Blake 2015.
46. Robertson 2014; Blake 2015.
47. Kottak 2009, 4.
48. Appadurai 1996, 12.
49. Appadurai 1996, 13.
50. Katzmaier 2017.
51. For a more detailed explanation of this perspective, see Wellner 2016.
52. Wellner 2016, 16.
53. Wellner 2016.
54. Lange 2017. For an early influential work that discussed the problematics of mixing commerce, sociality, and education, see Seiter 2005.
55. Gillespie 2010, 347.
56. Mannheim and Tedlock 1995.
57. Mannheim and Tedlock 1995.
58. See Rheingold [1993] 2000; Herring 1996; Markham 1998; Cherny 1999; Baym 2000; Miller and Slater 2000; Kendall 2002; Wakeford 2003; Ito, Matsuda, and Okabe 2005; Boellstorff 2008; and Burrell 2012.
59. Warman 2014.
60. Markham 2003.
61. Scribner 2013.
62. Wilson and Peterson argue that scholars should attend to “deconstructing dichotomies of offline and online, real and virtual, and individual and collective.” See Wilson and Peterson 2002, 456.
63. Geraci notes that even though everyday usage of the word “virtual” implies a kind of absence, “virtual worlds are most assuredly, real worlds” even if they are not “physical.” Nardi seeks to “rehabilitate the term virtual, recognizing it not as indexing the exotic, dystopian, inauthentic, or unmoored . . . , or as one term in a false dichotomy, but as a genuine site of human activity supported by crafted objects that open possibilities for social and cultural development.” See Nardi 2015, 19. See also Manning 2009; Geraci 2014. For a discussion about how prior terminology has complicated understanding of interaction, see Lange 2008c.
64. For example, Boellstorff argues that the virtual should not be seen as opposed to the “real” but to the “actual.” See Boellstorff 2008, 21. Similarly, Zhao says that “virtual” experience is “real” but not “actual.” See Zhao 2014.
65. Cool 2012.
66. Castronova 2005.
67. Drawing from computer interface research, Coleman uses the term “x-reality” to describe “an interlacing of virtual and real experiences.” For Coleman, “x” represents a variable that stands in for people’s different forms of reality that include networked mediation. See Coleman 2011, 19–20.
68. Nardi 2015, 20.
69. Coleman 2011, 19–20.
70. Coleman argues that defining true access only in terms of those who are “fully technologically engaged in media networks” reifies a neocolonialist view. In this view, voices do not count if they are only partially technically connected or not at all. See Coleman 2011, 37–38.
71. Coleman 2011, 20.
72. Miller et al. 2016, 7.
73. See “WhatsApp” n.d.
74. For a discussion on the problems of anonymity and discourse on YouTube, see Hess 2009.
75. See Hunter et al. 2012.
76. Kendall 2002.
77. Phillips 2015.
78. Coleman 2014.
79. Wellman and Gulia 1999, 177.
80. Security experts note that even when individuals use private mode when accessing online services, this act “does nothing to conceal your I.P. [Internet Protocol] address, a unique number that identifies your entry or access point to the Internet. So Web sites may not know your browsing history, but they will probably know who you are and where you are as well as when and how long you viewed their pages.” See Murphy 2012.
81. Sharfstein 2015.
82. Goffman 1963.
83. Goffman 1959.
84. Warner 2002.
85. Krauss 1976.
86. Griffith and Papacharissi 2010.
87. Senft and Baym 2015.
88. Burgess and Green 2009.
89. Senft’s Google searches for the term “voyeur” revealed usages that were far broader than originally conceived by psychologists. This contrasts to media makers who invite others to view them in public forums. See Senft 2008, 45.
90. See Lasch 1979; Twenge and Campbell 2009; and Twenge 2013.
91. See University of North Florida 2014.
92. Grijalva et al. 2015.
93. Bakhtin [1975] 1981.
94. Weiner 1992.
95. Turner 2002.
96. The video was featured on the welcome page for several days in early October 2007. It was also featured on YouTube’s welcome page in Italy, where it had garnered over 550,000 views as of October 16, 2007.
97. Hayles 1999.
98. Lévi-Strauss used the term “to think with” when speaking about animal behavior. See Lévi-Strauss 1963, 89. Turkle invoked it to analyze metaphors of computer usage. See Turkle 1984.
99. Whitehead and Wesch 2012a, 1–10.
100. Bloustein 2003.
101. For example, a “view count” reportedly changes across sites. One YouTuber noted that Facebook’s service counts a “view” after someone has watched a video for about three seconds, even if the sound is off. In contrast, the same video maker observed that YouTube’s service counts a “view” after thirty seconds of viewership. Neither of them represents watching an entire video. It is also claimed that after thirty seconds only about 20 percent of viewers are actually still watching. See Green 2015.
102. Wellner 2016, 145.
Chapter 2: YouTube Initiation
1. Lange 2014.
2. Shrum et al. 2005.
3. Hampe 1997.
4. Shrum et al. 2005.
5. Shrum et al. 2005.
6. Grimshaw and Ravetz 2009, 119.
7. Grimshaw and Ravetz 2009, 119.
8. Shrum et al. 2005.
9. Evans and Jones 2011.
10. Jenkins et al. 2006.
11. Jenkins 1992.
12. Jenkins et al. 2006, 3.
13. Radway 1984.
14. Jenkins, Ford, and Green 2013.
15. Purcell 2013.
16. Researchers recognize the importance of commentary. Jones and Schieffelin argue that YouTube provides “an inherently dialogic forum in which young people and texting aficionados can display, develop, and co-construct the meaning of preferential stylistic and communicative practices.” See Jones and Schieffelin 2009, 1075.
17. Lorraine subsequently deleted her account; current statistics on view counts and subscribers are unavailable.
18. Ito et al. 2010, 31.
19. Gauntlett 2011, 85.
20. See Müller 2009.
21. Gauntlett 2011, 87.
22. Stokel-Walker 2017.
23. Newlands 2015.
24. Gauntlett 2011.
25. Gauntlett 2011, 85.
26. “Peter Oakley—Obituary” 2014.
27. Sørenssen 2009.
28. Sørenssen 2009, 147. See also Harley and Fitzpatrick 2009.
29. Lange 2009.
30. Twenge and Campbell 2009, 121.
31. Damon and Louis 2011. Damon and Louis argue that people who are more narcissistic tend to post more online on YouTube, blogs, and social media. Narcissists tend to find content generation more gratifying. See also Panek, Nardis, and Konrath 2013.
32. Freud 1914.
33. Maddox 2017.
34. Twenge and Campbell 2009, 120–122.
35. Strangelove 2010.
36. Stetka 2016.
37. See Sheehy 2017.
38. Although aspects of Facebook, such as posting photos, positively correlated with narcissism, it was also found that “social media is primarily a tool for staying connected” rather than “for self promotion.” See Alloway et al. 2014, 150. A counter discourse suggests that since personality is shaped before becoming a teenager, narcissism is fueled by patterns in homes and schools that promote an overinflated and precious sense of children’s abilities. See Firestone 2012.
39. Lange 2009.
40. Lasch 1979, 32.
41. Senft and Baym 2015.
42. Lucy R. Lippard as quoted in Sims 1984, 47.
43. Griffith and Papacharissi 2010.
44. Griffith and Papacharissi 2010.
45. Stetka 2016.
46. Verdi and Hodson 2006.
47. Lange 2007c.
48. Lange 2009.
49. Wahlberg 2009.
50. Wahlberg 2009.
51. Lenhart et al. 2013.
52. Purcell 2013.
53. Purcell 2013.
54. Purcell 2013.
55. Lastufka and Dean 2009, 133.
56. Twenge and Campbell 2009, 120–122.
57. I proposed this term to describe the strong preferences people hold when making media or engaging in particular media activities. See Lange 2014, 35.
58. Lange 2014, 20.
59. Twenge and Campbell 2009, 108.
60. Lave and Wenger 1991; Wenger 1998.
61. Strangelove 2010, 126.
62. One month after the gathering, YouTubers reported that the Midwest Lurker still had no account.
63. Sontag 1977.
64. Sontag 1977, 24.
65. Williams 2014.
66. Amid the estimated 2.5 million annual US weddings, a majority of couples reportedly demand “the creation of a visual ideal for their wedding day.” See Benzer 1996, 19. Most couples hire wedding photographers and cull photos from guests. See Douglas 2016.
67. Alexander 2013.
68. Gershon 2010.
69. See Mitchell 1986, 8.
70. Gonchar 2013.
71. Paumgarten 2014. Video bloggers’ dreams of relatively inexpensive, body-mounted cameras have materialized in the GoPro camera.
72. Dedman and Paul 2006. The book provides technical vlogging tips as well as connecting to vlogging social groups.
73. Lange 2014, 169–184.
74. Bondanella 2002, 68.
75. The paparazzi industry is reportedly “booming,” with celebrity photographs increasing. See McNamara 2011.
76. McNamara 2011.
77. Weisman 2012.
78. Mendelson 2007.
79. For example, McNamara argues that Paris Hilton’s embodiment of a particular female identity resonated and attracted media attention. See McNamara 2016, 26.
80. McNamara 2016, 28.
81. Hallin 1992.
82. Goldhaber 1997.
83. Sontag 1977, 8.
84. Williams 2014.
85. Hiniker, Shoenebeck, and Kientz 2016.
86. DeWalt and DeWalt 2011, 28–29.
87. Paul 1953.
88. Behar 1996, 5.
89. Tedlock 1991.
90. Descartes [1637] 1998.
91. Hull 1998, 21–22.
92. Hull 1998, 39.
93. Lefebvre 2004, 16.
94. Hull 1998, 21.
95. See Wellner 2016.
96. Hull 1998, 22.
97. Hull 1998, 21.
98. Müller 2009, 126–139.
99. Lange 2014.
Chapter 3: Growing Closer
1. Pink 2015, 28.
2. Markham 1998, 125.
3. Bakhtin [1975] 1981.
4. For information about purposeful sampling, see Coyne 1997.
5. Gupta and Ferguson 1997.
6. Pink 2015.
7. Pink 2015, 46.
8. Pink 2015, 80.
9. A more precise term might be “enplacement.” According to the dictionary, the en- prefix suggests “making” something, which emphasizes changing states and acts of co-creation. Examples appear in words such as enable, enact, and envision. The concept of “enplacement” might help to disassociate from “emplacement’s” connotations of spatial fixity.
10. See Turkle 1984; Markham 1998; Cherny 1999; Baym 2000; Rheingold [1993] 2000; and Kendall 2002.
11. Graham 2012.
12. See Wakeford 2003. See also Burrell 2012.
13. Ingold 2008.
14. Miller and Slater 2000, 1.
15. Christensen 2003.
16. An excellent example is found in Lieberman 2003.
17. Miller et al. 2016, 12.
18. Appadurai [1990] 2006.
19. Appadurai [1990] 2006, 591.
20. Marcus 1995.
21. According to “Stickam” n.d., the site was a live video-sharing chat service that ran from 2005 to 2013. It enabled people to see and communicate with several other people in video feeds simultaneously. Interviewees said they often preferred Stickam because it felt more “live” and present than the asynchronous videos that characterized YouTube’s functionality at the time.
22. Pink draws on Ingold’s ideas of “meshwork” in this sense. See Pink 2015, 37. See also Ingold 2008.
23. Hamedy 2015.
24. See “The Mary Tyler Moore Show Opening Sequence” n.d.
25. “Minneapolis Gets Mary Tyler Moore Statue” 2002; Rodell 2013.
26. Turner 2002.
27. YouTube’s beta phase lasted from May to December 15, 2005. See Dickey 2013.
28. Meltzer and Phillips 2009.
29. Stelter 2008.
30. Boots 2016.
31. Ikeda 1998, 162.
32. See “Christmas Truce” n.d.
33. Sobchack 1999.
34. Sokolowski 2000.
35. Bakhtin [1975] 1981, 198.
36. Perrino 2015.
37. Bakhtin [1975] 1981, 243.
38. Dyck 2002.
39. Bakhtin [1975] 1981, 84.
40. Lefebvre 2004, 18.
41. Lange 2011.
42. Dyck 2002.
43. Lange 2015a.
44. See Gal 2002. For a discussion of how the public and private relationship fractalizes in social media and video, see Lange 2007b.
45. Chalfen 1987.
46. Zimmerman 1995.
47. Pini 2009.
48. Pini 2009, 85.
49. Weston 1992.
50. Weston 1992; Moran 2002.
51. Pini 2009.
52. See Dicks et al. 2011.
53. Postill and Pink 2012.
54. Early research assessing functionality of modalities focused on factors such as synchronous or asynchronous interaction, characteristics that may have limited value for evaluating fungibility of interactions, which were largely inter-threaded between so-called online and offline experiences for YouTubers. More recent research further suggests that in-person discussions preceded by mediated conversation (whether synchronous or asynchronous) are reportedly more productive than those conducted only in person. See Dietz-Uhler and Bishop-Clark 2001.
55. Edwards 2010, 84.
Chapter 4: Syncing Up through Reciprocity
1. Dodaro 2011.
2. Offer 1997, 452.
3. Douglas 1990, vii–xviii; see also Sahlins 1972.
4. See Sahlins 1972 and Weiner 1992 for analyses of reciprocity’s complications.
5. For information about first-generation vloggers who began posting videos to their own video blogs outside of YouTube prior to 2005, see Lange 2014. See also Berry 2018.
6. See, for instance, Mark Day’s video Greetings from VidCon, posted on July 10, 2010.
7. Scott 2011.
8. Blip.tv removed low-earning videos after Maker Studios acquired it in 2013. Blip.tv shut down in August 2015. See “Blip (website)” n.d.
9. Kollock 1999.
10. Kollock 1999.
11. Barak and Gluck-Ofri 2007.
12. Lange 2007c.
13. boyd 2010.
14. “The Anatomy of a Forgotten Social Network” 2014.
15. “The Anatomy of a Forgotten Social Network” 2014. See also Chang et al. 2014.
16. Pelaprat and Brown 2012.
17. Pelaprat and Brown 2012.
18. Pelaprat and Brown 2012.
19. Goldhaber 1997.
20. Gouldner 1960.
21. Blau [1964] 1986, 88–114.
22. Offer 1997.
23. Gouldner 1960.
24. Gouldner 1960.
25. Commenters sometimes compete to be the first to post, often with the declaration “First!”
26. Dreier 2012.
27. Narotzky 2007.
28. Twenge and Campbell 2009, 240.
29. Twenge and Campbell 2009, 240.
30. See Yarow and Angelova 2010.
31. Sahlins 1972, 194–195.
32. Pelaprat and Brown 2012.
33. Sahlins 1972, 194.
34. Sahlins 1972, 194.
35. Lovink 2011, 54.
36. Unlike social media connections, which are publicly visible, YouTube allows viewers to keep their subscription preferences private. A video maker can see only the subscribers who have agreed to be identified. When I click on my list of subscribers, YouTube’s interface returns the message, “Only subscribers who share their subscriptions publicly are shown. Subscribers who have their subscriptions set to private don’t show here, even if the account is subscribed to your channel.”
37. Marwick and boyd 2010, 116.
38. Yan 1996, 210–238.
39. YouTube operates in a market economy in which videos may be commercialized through advertising. Sub-for-sub arrangements that seek monetization through mutual exchange render videos as commodities that may monetarily benefit platform operators and creators.
40. Yan 1996, 218.
41. Mauss 1990.
42. Marwick and boyd 2010, 114.
43. Wesch 2009, 23.
44. Pelaprat and Brown 2012.
45. Pelaprat and Brown 2012.
46. See Lastufka and Dean 2009, 133.
47. Nalty 2010, 195.
48. Twenge and Campbell 2009.
49. Joseph Walther long ago observed the impact of time on the timbre of interactions. “One-shot” studies attributing negative interactions to the effects of a medium did not consider the influence of anticipation of ongoing interaction on behavior. He stated: “[Computer-mediated communication] appears to be more interpersonally positive when used by members who at least think that their association will have some longevity.” See Walther 1994, 495.
50. Sahlins 1972, 195.
51. See Carter et al. 2014. Carter et al. characterize the “like for like” hashtag as “overtly narcissistic.” See also Andren 2016.
52. boyd 2010.
53. Park, Li, and Kim 2016.
54. Veszelszki 2016.
55. Andren 2016.
56. Lefebvre 2004, 78.
57. Lefebvre 2004, 78.
58. Lefebvre 2004, 99–100.
59. Lange 2010.
60. See Weiner 1992; Godelier 2002.
61. Godelier 2002.
62. Weiner 1992, 6.
63. Pelaprat and Brown 2012.
64. On social media sites, “follow blasts” occur when participants follow many accounts to entice people into following back. Follow blasts ostensibly work because they parlay a user’s impulse to follow people in return when they discover a new follower. However, follow blasts exhibit risks. They are easily detected and may result in an account being banned or having privileges removed for sending spam. For a pundit’s description of the Law of Reciprocity on Twitter as well as on follow blasts and their risks, see Dogan 2010.
65. Twenge and Campbell 2009, 112.
66. Marwick and boyd 2010.
67. Sahlins 1972, 193–194.
68. Sahlins 1972, 194.
69. Lange 2003, 2014.
70. See, for instance, the video Zen Archer, posted on February 15, 2015, on YouTube by ogier1.
71. MacCormack 1976.
72. Kolm 2006.
73. Simmel 1950, 389.
74. Appadurai [1990] 2006.
75. Sahlins 1972, 193–194.
Chapter 5: What Defines a Community?
1. See Curtis [1992] 1997; Cherny 1999; and Rheingold [1993] 2000.
2. Althusser 1971.
3. Juhasz 2009.
4. Boellstorff et al. 2012, 126–128. See also Fetterman 1987.
5. de Seta 2018a.
6. Lovink 2011, 52.
7. Lovink 2011, 57.
8. The removal may have resulted from comments that were excessively flagged by viewers as inappropriate, were spam, or had been posted by commenters with now-deleted accounts. Hater comments containing insults and profanity still remained as of July 2018 as part of the 552 comments.
9. Moreau and Alderman 2011.
10. According to one manual for dealing with graffiti, “Removing graffiti as soon as it appears is the key to its elimination—and recurrence.” See Weaver 1995. Repainting graffiti to leave a clean surface tends to attract additional graffiti. See Eck and Martinelli 1998.
11. See de Seta 2018b.
12. Cohen 1985, 11.
13. Hillery 1955.
14. Redfield 1955, 113.
15. Gupta and Ferguson 1997.
16. Cohen 1985, 12.
17. Wellman and Gulia 1999, 187.
18. Wellman and Gulia 1999, 187.
19. Amit 2002c, 16.
20. Silverstone 1999, 104.
21. Amit 2002c, 3.
22. Lange 2008b; Gruzd, Wellman, and Takhteyev 2011.
23. Anderson 1983, 6.
24. Anderson 1983.
25. Silverstein 2000, 124.
26. Amit 2002b.
27. Amit 2002a; Silverstein 2000.
28. Mitchell et al. 2016.
29. Burgess and Green 2009, 90.
30. Eldon 2011.
31. Rotman and Preece 2010, 330.
32. Rotman and Preece 2010, 322.
33. Cunningham and Craig 2016, 5413.
34. Cohen 1985, 98.
35. Rheingold [1993] 2000, xxxi.
36. Lange 2008a; Burgess and Green 2009; and Rotman and Preece 2010.
37. Strangelove 2010, 105.
38. Bauman 1996, 15.
39. Strangelove 2010, 105; Douglas 1992, 133.
40. Strangelove 2010, 120–121.
41. Subscribers received alerts when a video maker posted a new video. From its inception until the present writing in 2018, subscribing to a YouTube channel was free of charge and merely involved clicking a yellow Subscribe button on a YouTuber’s page.
42. Dyck 2002.
43. Lange 2007a.
44. Nip 2004.
45. Pink et al. 2017, 176.
46. According to Althusser’s concept of interpellation, a person being hailed acknowledges the hail, thus identifying themselves as the subject of the hail. A classic example occurs when a police officer calls “Hey you!” down a busy street. Those who turn to answer interpellate themselves as subjects of the hail. Similarly, those who commented on community interpellated themselves as stakeholders in the discussion about prospects for digital community. See Althusser 1971.
47. Holmes and Marcus 2008, 595.
48. Holmes and Marcus 2008, 597.
49. Reagle 2015, 181.
50. Anderson 1983.
51. Silverstein 2000.
52. Amit and Rapport 2002.
53. Uldam and Askanius 2013.
54. Martínez 1995, 208.
55. Pink 2011, 229.
56. YouTube introduced video annotations in 2008. The site reportedly eliminated them in 2017, in favor of a feature called End Screen and Cards, a mobile and desktop tool that apparently enables similar functionalities, such as linking to other videos and polling viewers. Some 60 percent of YouTube’s watch time is reportedly from mobile devices. Annotation use, which was available only as a desktop feature, fell by 70 percent over the years. See Statt 2017.
57. Wogan 2006.
58. Wogan 2006, 29.
59. Hunter et al. 2012.
60. Herring 1996.
61. Papacharissi 2004.
62. Hutchens et al. 2015, 1210.
63. This post was not coded as a hater comment. Should it have been?
64. O’Sullivan and Flanagin 2003.
65. Kendall 2002, 112–113.
66. See Hill 2012.
67. In one example, a man threatened a congressman. The perpetrator was not anonymous because he put his face on camera. Officers eventually found him by examining identity indexes such as IP addresses. See Anderson 2010.
68. Reagle 2015, 175–176. See also Amadeo 2015.
69. Names that people provide consistently on social media do not always map to legal names. See Lil Miss Hot Mess 2015.
70. Reagle 2015, 175.
71. Kelly 2013.
72. Hern 2013.
73. Lovink 2011, 46.
74. Lovink 2011, 47.
75. Miller et al. 2016, 36. Miller et al. noted that concerns about social media and privacy are “parochial,” meaning that they differ according to place. While people in some countries express concern about privacy, people in India and China may use social media to construct private social spaces.
76. The case of Kathryn Knott demonstrates how some people feel comfortable posting racist messages online under their official names. See Murray 2014.
77. Merlan 2015.
78. Reagle 2015, 181.
79. Kendall 2002, 112–113.
80. Coleman 2014.
81. As of July 2018, the accounts of teddieppl77 and microwavefishsticks could not be located on YouTube.
82. A similar point is made in Natanson 1986.
83. Mosendz 2015.
84. Garfinkel 1967, 116–185.
85. Kennedy 2006.
86. Warner 2002.
87. Granovetter 1973.
88. Pink et al. 2017.
89. Reagle 2015, 119.
90. See Juhasz 2008; Hess 2009; and Buckingham, Willett, and Pini 2011.
91. Hess 2009.
92. PR Newswire 2015.
93. Uldam and Askanius 2013.
94. Uldam and Askanius 2013.
95. Altucher 2013.
96. Radsch 2016.
97. Radsch 2016, 38.
98. YouTube has been referred to as the internet’s comment “cesspool.” See Slutsky 2014.
99. Perez 2016.
100. Perez 2016.
101. Reagle 2015, 174.
102. Reagle 2015, 183, 185.
103. Ash’s Twitter account calls her “pronoun indifferent.” Her partner refers to Ash in videos as “she.”
104. Mediakix 2018.
105. Rouch 1975.
106. Pink 2011, 231.
107. Pink 2011.
108. Geertz [1972] 2005.
109. Miller et al. 2016.
110. Juhasz 2008, 133.
111. Juhasz 2009.
112. Juhasz 2008, 135.
113. Wali 2010, 147.
114. Wesch 2007.
115. Wesch 2011, 23.
116. Palmer 2007.
117. Wesch 2011, 26.
118. Nahon and Hemsley 2013.
119. Nahon and Hemsley 2013, 16.
120. Jenkins, Ford, and Green 2013, 16–23. For a summary, see Jenkins 2009a.
121. Nahon and Hemsley 2013.
122. Nahon and Hemsley 2013, 11.
123. For information about promoting interest-driven learning, see the work of Mizuko Ito and others in the Connected Learning initiative: https://clalliance.org/about-connected-learning/.
124. Newman 2008.
125. Vernallis 2013, 149–150.
126. Rotman and Preece 2010.
127. Postill 2011.
128. Postill and Pink 2012, 131–132. See also Amit and Rapport 2002.
129. Amit 2002a.
130. Amit 2002a, 14.
131. Appadurai 1996; Ito et al. 2010.
132. Appadurai 1996, 8.
133. Amit 2002d, 161–166.
134. Rapport 2002, 169.
135. Lovink 2011, 58.
Chapter 6: Portals to the Posthuman
1. Hayles 1999.
2. Bollmer 2013.
3. Plato [370 BCE] 1973.
4. Poletti and Rak 2014.
5. Hayles 1999, 2–3.
6. Wesch 2012.
7. Beth Coleman proposes the term “avatar” in a similar context. In computer science an avatar is a visual representation of the self in a virtual environment. The term also connotes behaviorally representative forms such as text messaging and uses of social media. See Coleman 2011, 12.
8. Gingrich, Ochs, and Swedlund 2002.
9. Miller et al. 2016, x.
10. Whitehead and Wesch 2012b.
11. For information on actor-network theory, see Latour 2005.
12. Hayles 1999, 286.
13. Hayles 1999, 291.
14. Kennedy 2006, 874.
15. Whitehead and Wesch 2012a.
16. Hayles 1999, 291.
17. McNeill 2012.
18. Hayles 1999, 3.
19. Kincaid 2010.
20. Knight 2012.
21. In 2006, prior to the partnership program, YouTube introduced an account category called YouTube Director, which enabled users who had been vetted to be given director status for free. Directors could upload videos that were longer than ten minutes. See YouTube Team 2006.
22. Before 2010, all videos for standard accounts were reportedly limited to ten minutes. Due to technological improvements, as of July 29, 2010, standard accounts could post videos up to fifteen minutes long. See Eash n.d.
23. McNeill 2012.
24. Hayles 1999.
25. Hayles 1999, 255.
26. Coleman 2011, 41.
27. Coleman 2011, 137.
28. See Rheingold [1993] 2000, 139.
29. See Boellstorff 2008.
30. Phillips 2015.
31. Phillips 2015, 24.
32. Phillips 2015, 25.
33. For instance, Amazon.com’s algorithms incorrectly pulled tens of thousands of gay-friendly fiction books from its sales lists. Such decisions have emotional, political, and financial impact on authors. See Gillespie 2014. For details on the misclassification of gay-themed books, see Flood 2009.
34. In examining “video assemblages” or groups of creators, videos, processes, and platforms on YouTube and other sites such as Facebook, Hondros observed that participants exhibited similar frustrations about automated processes, such as how posts were filtered and how automated bots served take-down notices. Video creators were often “left with assemblages that were inadequate with regard to their objectives as video producers.” See Hondros 2016, 222.
35. Strangelove 2010, 68. See also Wright 2008.
36. Strangelove 2010; Wright 2008.
37. For community guidelines, see https://www.youtube.com/yt/about/policies/#community-guidelines. For information on hate speech, see https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2801939.
38. For information about harassment and cyberbullying, see https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2802268.
39. Coleman 2011, 41.
40. Other observed ratings were 2 stars (Nothing special), 3 stars (Worth watching), and 4 stars (Pretty cool).
41. Lohensohn 2010.
42. Lange 2014.
43. Gayle 2012.
44. Latour 2005, 75.
45. Hayles 1999, 256.
46. Cole Perriman is an amalgam of the authors’ names: Wim Coleman and Pat Perrin. See Coleman and Perrin 1994.
47. Brubaker and Cooper argue that scholarship should move beyond the idea of “identity” and focus on processes of identification. See Brubaker and Cooper 2000.
48. Couser 2004.
49. Henwood et al. 2001.
50. Couser 2004.
51. Lange 2014.
52. See http://cc.au.dk/en/research/research-programmes/cultural-transformations/cultures-and-practices-of-death-and-dying/dorn/.
53. Leaver and Highfield 2018, 30–31.
54. Goffman 1959.
55. Lever and Highfield 2018, 32.
56. McNamara 2016, 1–8.
57. Even diaries intended for private consumption may circulate beyond an assumed audience. See Kitzmann 2004. For a discussion of misinterpreted Web pages, see Stern 2008.
58. McNeill 2012, 76.
59. See Christensen and Gotved 2015.
60. Christensen and Gotved 2015.
61. See Leaver 2013.
62. Ryan 2012.
63. Lopes 2015.
64. Fowler 2013.
65. See Myers 2011, 35; Carroll and Romano 2011, 146–147.
66. Bollmer 2013.
67. Leaver 2013.
68. Leaver 2013, 2.
69. Lefebvre 2004, 99–100.
70. Gershon 2010.
71. Bollmer 2013.
72. See Christensen and Gotved 2015, 5. For more information on the concept of the deathstyle, see Davies 2005; Davies and Rumble 2012.
73. Ryan 2012.
74. Bollmer 2013, 150.
75. Christensen and Gotved 2015.
76. Fowler 2013.
77. Margaret Gibson as quoted in Gotved 2014, 117. See Gibson 2007.
78. Hanks 2012.
79. Leaver 2013.
80. Stine Gotved observed that the “continuing bonds” theme was common in research studies. See Gotved 2014.
81. See Wahlberg 2009; Ryan 2012; and Bollmer 2013. See also the collection of papers for the panel “Coping with Death and Grief through Technology” presented at Internet Research 14.0, the fourteenth international conference of the Association of Internet Researchers, October 23–26, 2013, Denver, Colorado.
82. Lefebvre 2004, 46.
83. Gielen 2015; AdOps 2018.
84. TubeMogul 2013.
85. Discussions of migration in gaming communities noted that participants sometimes reached a moment in which loyalty to other players superseded the need to play a particular game. See Pearce 2009.
86. Another conceptualization is the idea of “digital diaspora,” in which groups migrate to different sites. For anthropologists, diaspora are groups who mourn the violent or sudden loss of a homeland and long to return. The term digital diaspora may encompass a range of emotions from intensive feelings of loss to more casual responses to changes in media use. See Boellstorff 2008.
87. See “TheWineKone” n.d.
88. Stickam operated from February 2005 until January 2013. It offered live streaming video enabling several participants to connect simultaneously in a video chat room. See Constine 2013. See also “Stickam” n.d.
89. Burgess and Green 2009, 65. Burgess and Green observed that many YouTubers maintained their YouTube account names on Stickam.
90. Siegel 2011.
91. Constine 2013.
93. Jackson 2014.
94. Jackson 2014.
95. See Holpuch 2012.
96. This term is adapted from Arjun Appadurai and is discussed in more detail in chapter 3. See Appadurai [1990] 2006.
97. Lange 2008c.
98. Driscoll and Paloque-Berges 2017.
99. Driscoll and Paloque-Berges 2017, 49.
100. Guo and Lee 2013.
101. Raun 2016.
102. Naslund et al. 2014.
103. Cunningham and Craig 2016.
104. Niemeyer and Gerber 2015.
Chapter 7: Living with Arrhythmia
1. Lefebvre 2004.
2. Neff and Stark 2002.
3. An announcement about eliminating friending appeared by YT Kendall on December 6, 2011, on the YouTube Help Forum site, with an update on December 12, 2011; see Kendall 2011.
4. Faeth 2012.
5. A rubric addressing these dynamics is “mediatization,” which includes “institutional practices that reflexively link processes of communication to processes of commoditization.” See Agha 2011.
6. Mitroff and Martin 2017.
7. Calabro 2017.
8. YouTube’s beta phase lasted from May to December 15, 2005. See Dickey 2013.
9. Palladino 2017.
10. Hudson 2015.
11. Pathak 2018.
12. YouTube 2018a.
13. See YouTube 2018b.
14. Rosenblatt 2018.
15. See “Patreon” n.d.
16. See “#79 John Green.” 2014; Leather 2018.
17. Hudson 2015.
18. Kirkpatrick 2007.
19. O’Neill 2012.
20. Pew Research Staff 2012.
21. Kaufman 2014.
22. Popper 2017.
23. Musil 2018.
24. Ram 2018.
25. Zaher 2018.
26. Zaher 2018.
27. Thompson 2016.
28. della Cava 2013
29. Kaufman 2014.
30. Kozlowski 2013.
31. Crushell 2018. See also Cunningham, Craig, and Silver 2016.
32. See Associated Press 2014.
33. Pacheco 2014.
34. Shields 2014.
35. Shields 2014.
36. Gutelle 2014. Zappin filed suit in 2013, alleging he had been forced out of Maker Studios, and again in 2014 to block the Disney acquisition of Maker Studios. Both cases were dismissed, and Zappin reportedly earned $25 million from the sale. See Reim 2016.
37. D’Anastasio 2017.
38. For a discussion of the benefits of networks, see Mueller 2013.
39. D’Anastasio 2017.
40. Becker 1982.
41. Prangley 2015.
42. Li 2015.
43. Metzger 2017.
44. Cannon 2017.
45. Dryden 2016.
46. Weiss 2017a.
47. Villarreal and Pierson 2016.
48. VidCon Europe launched in 2017 and took place in Amsterdam in 2018. See Crushell 2018. VidCon Australia was held September 2017 and August–September in 2018 in Melbourne. See Weiss 2017b; “VidCon” n.d.
49. Walsh 2016.
50. See Bilton 2015.
51. Spangler 2018.
52. Latinx (pronounced La-teen-ex) is a non-gender-specific term that collectively refers to Latinos and Latinas. See Logue 2015.
53. Her words echo the sentiments of those expressed by Mr. Safety (also known by his YouTube channel name of SMPFilms), who made similar remarks at a meet-up in Hollywood.
54. See Jarvis 2016.
55. BET Staff 2018. For an analysis of the “Chocolate Rain” phenomenon, see Burgess 2008.
56. One pundit observed that VidCon moved away from its initial roots of being a “classic YouTube gathering,” which originally served creators by emphasizing “networking, learning, and seeing familiar faces.” He lamented that VidCon became more expensive and less accessible and that it compromised networking by concentrating on teen fan events. See Smith 2014.
57. As of 2018, YouTube provided a time stamp for posted comments at several increments. For instance, a time stamp might note that a comment was posted “38 minutes ago.” As time passes, the time stamp converts to approximate hours, days, weeks, months, and years. After one year, the time stamp provides no additional specificity beyond the number of years since its posting.
58. Popken 2018.
59. Popken 2018.
60. Dave 2018.
61. Popken 2018.
62. Companies that track YouTube viewing metrics apparently corroborate this perception. Videos that are ten minutes or longer generally gain more views than those that are five minutes or less. See Gielen and Rosen 2016.
63. MacInnes 2018.
64. Rockrapid 2018.
65. Alexander 2018b.
66. Alexander 2018b.
67. Kaufman 2014.
68. Stokel-Walker 2017.
69. Alexander 2018a.
70. Cunningham, Craig, and Silver 2016.
71. Portelli 1991, 51.
72. Cunningham, Craig, and Silver 2016, 377.
73. Cunningham and Craig characterize the new YouTube ecology as “relatively frictionless” in comparison with “national broadcasting and systems of film and DVD licensing by territory.” See Cunningham and Craig 2016, 5411. However, participatory complications and frictions routinely occur on YouTube. For instance, a YouTuber might upload copyrighted content under “fair use” to exhibit for review or critique, but such content may be flagged and removed. For a discussion about participatory challenges on YouTube, see Lange 2017.
Chapter 8: Conclusion
1. Paul 2016.
2. Meissner 2015.
3. Wellner 2016, 16.
4. Goodson 2012.
5. Panzarino 2013.
6. Vossen n.d.
7. See Kavoori 2011, who provides one “cut” of YouTube. Michael Strangelove notes that “Watching YouTube cannot capture all of the ‘Tube’ but it does provide an overview of YouTube’s social features.” See Strangelove 2010.
8. Miller et al. 2016.
9. Miller et al. 2016, 9.
10. boyd and Ellison 2007.
11. Miller et al. 2016, 15.
12. LaFrance and Meyer 2014.
13. See “Twitter” n.d.
14. Dean 2010, 98. See also Cheng and Evans 2009.
15. Burgess 2015.
16. Ginsburg 2012.
17. The adjective “cultural” is increasingly used rather than the noun “culture,” which connotes homogeneity. See Appadurai 1996.
18. Kottak 2009, 500.
19. Driscoll and Paloque-Berges 2017, 48.
20. Driscoll and Paloque-Berges 2017, 50.
21. Post-phenomenology attempts to take a middle path between studying subjective experiences and analyzing technologized objects. See Rao et al. 2015, 454.
22. Wellner 2016.
23. Wellner 2016, 145.
24. Wellner 2016, 145.
25. Lang 2015.
26. Niemeyer and Gerber 2015.
27. See Naslund et al. 2014; Raun 2016.
28. Fish 1980, 14–17.
29. Moran 2002.
30. For details about my experiences, see Lange 2015b.
31. Cameron, Inzlicht, and Cunningham 2015.
32. Boellstorff 2008, 193. See also Harding 1991.
33. Phillips 2015.
34. Müller 2009.
35. See Stokel-Walker 2017.
36. Lange 2012.
37. Lange 2014. See also Berry 2018.
38. Miller et al. 2016, xvi.
39. Senft and Baym 2015.
40. Miller et al. 2016, 112.
41. Miller et al. 2016, 100.
42. People interacting online tend to exhibit consistent behavior under persistent pseudonyms. See Kendall 2002.
43. Phillips 2015.
44. Mirca Madianou and Daniel Miller use the term “polymedia” to refer to how people choose from a range of media according to how each one fulfills social and emotional needs. See Madianou and Miller 2012.
45. See Miller and Slater 2000; Postill 2011; Burrell 2012; and Miller et al. 2016.
46. Lefebvre 2004, 36.
47. Terranova 2000.
48. Inoue 2004.
49. See Musil 2018. Part of the stricter guidelines emerged as a result of the uploading of inappropriate, non-ad-friendly content such as graphic videos, hate speech, extremist videos about al-Qaeda, and videos depicting child endangerment or sexual abuse. See Dave 2018.
50. Scott 2012.
51. Scroggins 2012.
52. Ruby 1991.
53. Ruby 1995, 81.
54. Ruby 1991.
55. Pink 2011.
56. See Stern 2008, 111.
57. Morphy and Banks 1997.
58. Evans and Jones 2011.
59. Michael Wesch, as quoted in Pink 2011, 211.
60. Gross, Katz, and Ruby 1988, 2003.
61. See Perry and Marion 2010, 97.
62. Mann, Nolan, and Wellman 2003.
63. Shrum et al. 2005.
64. Gross, Katz, and Ruby 2003, xxii.
65. Lange 2014.
66. See Taylor 1996.
67. Nissenbaum 2004.
68. Meikle 2016, 92.
69. Ruby 1991, 56.
70. In a Pew survey of US teens between the ages of twelve and seventeen, Lenhart et al. found that 62 percent of online teens receive information about politics and civic events online. See Lenhart et al. 2010.
71. Irvine 2001.
72. Irvine 2001, 22.
73. Anderson 1983, 6.