- Patricia G..Lange

 saggio, 2007

Publicly Private and Privately Public: Social Networking on YouTube

 http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/lange.html

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.

Introduction

As social network sites (SNS) gain users and visibility, a wide range of websites have adopted SNS features (boyd & Ellison, this issue). YouTube began as a video sharing platform, but it also offers users a personal profile page—which YouTube calls a "channel page"—and enables "friending." Research on SNSs has shown that the meanings of social network site practices and features differ across sites and individuals (boyd, 2006). This article explores how YouTube users employ the technical and social affordances of the site to calibrate access to their videos by members of their social circle. Specifically, it examines how video sharing can support social networks by facilitating socialization among dispersed friends. An important goal of the article is to document how youth and young adults use YouTube's video sharing and commenting features to project identities that affiliate with particular social groups. The analysis also evaluates to what extent YouTube's video sharing practices are conducted in public view (versus as private video exchanges) and how these choices reflect different kinds of social relationships. For example, how does sharing videos with certain friends but not others reflect different kinds of friendships? More generally, how do young people maintain and delineate distinct social networks through public video sharing?

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 saggio,

The Vulnerable Video Blogger: Promoting Social Change through Intimacy

 http://www.barnard.edu/sfonline/blogs/lange_01.htm

Many people cannot understand why it would be important or interesting to watch intimate, spontaneous events in the lives of bloggers. People who are unfamiliar with the diary form of video blogging are often critical of this genre, seeing it as self-centered and obsessed with filming micro-events with no particular point or relevance beyond the videomaker's own life. Yet, many video bloggers argue that it is precisely by putting these intimate moments on the Internet for all to see that a space is created to expose and discuss difficult issues and thereby achieve greater understanding of oneself and others. Public access to intimate moments and the discourse surrounding the video artifacts on the Web allow social boundaries and pre-existing assumptions to be questioned and refashioned. In this paper I explore some of the themes that women have raised on video blogging sites by exploring their intimate moments. In particular, I wish to discuss videos made by women video bloggers who explore ideas about self-image, diversity, and helping Internet strangers.

Video blogging is an umbrella term that covers a wide number of genres, including everything from short video footage of spontaneous, real-life, personal moments, to scripted and preplanned "shows" with characters, narratives, and professional acting. A blog is a Web journal with entries that may include text comments or other media (such as photographs). The entries are placed in reverse chronological order so that the site's visitors encounter the most up-to-date entry first.[1] A video blog or "vlog" usually contains text and often photographs, but it also features video as a central mode of communication. Many video blogs are for the general public, although some are restricted to a small circle of friends. Video blogs may be diary-based, artistic, journalistic, entertainment-based, or they may take any number of other forms. What unites members of the video blogging community is a commitment to video as a crucial means of expressing and understanding issues that the video blogger wishes to share.

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