When I want to post a video so that my friends, my very small social network, can see it and appreciate it, I post it to Facebook. It’s private and it guarantees that people I don’t know won’t see it as long as I’ve managed the privacy settings appropriately. It would never have occurred to me to post it on YouTube. It’s just too public.
The most intriguing concept to me in this week’s readings came from Lange’s article on YouTube, specifically this notion of carving out a private space in a very public domain. I should note that I don’t spend a lot of time on YouTube directly. Often, the YouTube videos that I see are through other sources like Facebook or news outlets. I’ve kind of always assumed that people post to YouTube to get some kind of recognition, perhaps even celebrity. Justin Bieber and Soulja Boy come to mind as good examples. And of course, at the beginning of the semester we watched Mike Wesch’s digital ethnography video that identified “narcissism” as one of the reasons that people post their videos to YouTube. That message has stuck with me.
So this whole idea that people want to post videos on YouTube but also want to maintain a level of privacy strikes me as counter-intuitive. given that the article was published in 2007, I wonder what other options users had for posting videos privately online. As I said earlier, I generally post videos to FB but I wonder if the site didn't allow this type of posting at the time the research was conducted. And if this true, have the number of "publicly private" postings gone down?
I had similar thoughts about this reading. I was actually surprised to learn that you could upload videos to Youtube, and have access restricted.
ReplyDeleteI am a lurker on Youtube (that sounds scary), I don't post content and never comment, I observe. I always felt that Youtube was for those who wanted to be seen and be famous.
Hi Deepa,
ReplyDeleteI agree with you. Posting to YouTube opens you up to a much larger audience...the world. You made a great point. I think many people post to Youtube because they are looking for a large audience or a particular kind of audience. At the same time, it's interesting because often times people will post to Youtube but change the privacy settings so that no one can leave comments. So, as you said, it can appear counter-intuitive. People post to such an open platfom but at the same time, may be afraid to hear what people have to say about what they post. Very interesting conversation.