Week 7 – YouTube Community

After talking to Benny, I decided to focus on YouTube as my research platform. Started from the beginning of the semestre I knew I’d eventually have to choose one specific platform and honestly YouTube wasn’t the first that popped up in my head (I was thinking of Instagram). But after chatting with my friends during my preliminary interviews and Benny, I think YouTube would be a perfect place to start for a few reasons.

1. The fact that my interviewees stated that watching YouTube videos helped them through their vulnerable moments is very interesting to me. Even though they watched very different videos and for very different reasons, the fact that they chose YouTube videos as a means to console themselves means that it’s not simply a broadcasting/dissemination platform. There’s something more to it.
2. My interviewees said that watching these YouTube videos only helped them at the moment of vulnerability and didn’t really changed their perspectives on things they care about means to me that there are still barriers translating that virtual validation into concrete and lasting positive changes.
3. I fixated myself too much on the direct interaction between strangers online and forgot that there is a large population that DON’T interact with strangers but that doesn’t mean they are not getting the support they needed from just observing and watching from the side.
4. The idea of “if you want to learn about something, just go on YouTube” has became so ubiquitous and natural that I almost forgot that this is a very generational and kind of a weird phenomenon – we trust these strangers (a lot of times they are just common people like any of us) so much that we let them teach and validate our ideas without really knowing much about them.

Stakeholder Map

I first created a stakeholder map for YouTube:

I found it difficult to draw this stakeholder map because as I was adding more roles, I realized that any one of them can be all of them. A YouTuber can also be a follower for another internet celebrity on Instagram who also has a YouTube account. A person who just randomly browse YouTube videos may choose to not comment at all on one YouTube channel but gets fired up and gets into arguments with followers of another YouTuber. Everyone’s roles are all tangled up.

Research Papers on YouTube

Since YouTube has been around for a while now, there are a lot of research papers out there. I just finished reading one titled The “WeTube” in YouTube – Creating an Online Community Through Video Sharing. The researchers analyzed YouTube videos that have users directly talked about their views on the YouTube community. Researchers want to understand if YouTube users view the platform as a broadcasting medium or a virtual community by comparing the characteristics these users mention to researchers’ definition of online community (“an online community is a group [or various subgroups] of people, brought together by a shared interest, using a virtual platform, to interact and create user-generated content that is accessible to all community members, while cultivating communal culture and adhering to specific norms.”).

They concluded that to YouTube users, YouTube is “a community that serves as a platform for communication and interaction rather than a broadcasting application.”

However, as the researchers noted, their sample are predominantly active male YouTubers between the age of 20-40 who are “very opinionated and engaged in the idea of the YouTube community”. Random sampling was not present in this study and I’m not sure if any of the users are non-Americans (didn’t specify in the paper). So while this is interesting to read, I would want to read more about indirect interaction among YouTube users or user behaviours on the platform and how that affect these users’ personal lives.