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Publicly Private and Privately Public: Social Networking on YouTube

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Praktiken der Überwachten

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Abstract

YouTube is a public video-sharing website where people can experience varying degrees of engagement with videos, ranging from casual viewing to sharing videos in order to maintain social relationships. Based on a one-year ethnographic project, this article analyzes how YouTube participants developed and maintained social networks by manipulating physical and interpretive access to their videos. The analysis reveals how circulating and sharing videos reflects different social relationships among youth. It also identifies varying degrees of “publicness” in video sharing. Some participants exhibited “publicly private” behavior, in which video makers’ identities were revealed, but content was relatively private because it was not widely accessed. In contrast, “privately public” behavior involved sharing widely accessible content with many viewers, while limiting access to detailed information about video producers’ identities.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Reprint of P. G. Lange. 2008. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 13: 361–380 with permission from the publisher.

  2. 2.

    On YouTube channel pages, participants can display friend and subscription links or withhold them from view, even from other YouTube friends. This contrasts to Donath and boyd’s (2004) finding that friendship links are assumed by many participants to be “mutual” and “public” on social network sites. Subscriptions mean that when a new video is posted, all the video maker’s subscribers are alerted through email about it. Some interviewees had difficulty distinguishing the social difference between accepting a friend request and subscribing to their videos.

  3. 3.

    The claim here is not that all viewers interested in racism or other subjects will actually view a particular video, but rather, as Weintraub (1997) points out, that some subjects are considered more public than others. What scholars have characterized as relatively more public issues are those that concern a larger collective versus, for example, gossip that involves an event that relatively few people know or care about.

  4. 4.

    The two intermediate forms (“publicly private” and “privately public”) discussed here are not the only ones. However, these forms emerged as particularly salient in the dataset used in this study.

  5. 5.

    A “noob” (short for “newbie”) is a person who is new to a social group, typically an online environment. The term is often used in a derogatory way to characterize someone who is unfamiliar with the technical and social aspects of a particular online community or activity.

  6. 6.

    A sense for his level of participation can be gotten from his channel page: http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=mysteryguitarman. Retrieved October 29, 2007.

  7. 7.

    For more information about Guy Fawkes, see “The Gunpowder Plot“ (2006).

  8. 8.

    MadV’s channel page can be accessed at: http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=madv. Retrieved October 29, 2007.

  9. 9.

    Here I follow his fans’ convention and refer to him as “he.”.

  10. 10.

    http://us.oneworld.net/. Retrieved October 29, 2007.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. California College of the Arts, San Francisco, USA

    Patricia G. Lange

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  1. Patricia G. Lange
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Correspondence to Patricia G. Lange .

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  1. Universität Würzburg, Würzburg, Germany

    Martin Stempfhuber

  2. Universität Würzburg, Würzburg, Germany

    Elke Wagner

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Lange, P.G. (2019). Publicly Private and Privately Public: Social Networking on YouTube. In: Stempfhuber, M., Wagner, E. (eds) Praktiken der Überwachten. Springer VS, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-11719-1_10

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-11719-1_10

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