Thanks for Watching : An Anthropological Study of Video Sharing on YouTube by Patricia Lange

Author:Patricia Lange [Lange, Patricia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, General, Anthropology, Cultural & Social, Media Studies
ISBN: 9781607329473
Google: wbUaxwEACAAJ
Publisher: University Press of Colorado
Published: 2019-11-15T04:16:51+00:00

The best communities are the ones with every asshole on the planet coming together. Jews, blacks, mexicans, racists, homos, whites, haters, lovers, retards, scholars, assholes, truck drivers, circus freeks [sic]. This is just a bunch of fat boring white trash telling everyone they should be like them.

Fuck you

Similarly, teddieppl77 also appeared twice in the random sample, contributing this comment: “See no one likes to look at fat ppl. If you are fat I want you to know that, I am one of the ppl that laugh at you as you jiggle by.”

Examining their commentary in the random sample yields a prediction that their commentary across the entire corpus of comments posted to the video would contain similarly hateful and prejudiced comments. These predictions were confirmed. In the entire corpus of 1,906 comments posted to the video, microwavefishsticks contributed a total of 43 comments, of which 40 (93 percent) qualified as hater commentary because it contained profanity, misogyny, and other prejudices. This behavior pattern was remarkably consistent across this commenter’s participation in the video discussion. Although I do not know the person’s official name, I know that microwavefishsticks posts hater messages in a public forum and that their commentary formed at least 2 percent of the total comments.

Examining the commentary of teddieppl77 yielded a similar result. Teddieppl77 contributed a total of 101 comments to the video, of which 83 percent were hater comments; 42 percent of his remarks commented on weight. Teddieppl77’s commentary was also remarkably consistent, often engaging in petty battles with other commenters and routinely expressing a rejection of “fat people.” Elsewhere teddieppl77 claims to be an “Aussie.” Although I do not “know” these posters, their behavior patterns were consistent across the entire corpus of comments, which provided identification clues.81

A crucial question is, how did anonymity impact constructive commentary? Although haters were anonymous to me, so too were the people who contributed positive commentary. Anonymity was not a useful predictor of problematic commentary in the random sample. In fact, anonymous posters were the key drivers of constructive commentary in the discourse. Such findings complicate the mythos that anonymity is principally the problem in galvanizing support for public anthropology and stakeholder-driven “para-ethnographies.”

The flip side of the assumption that anonymity creates agonism is that knowing one’s interlocutors guarantees in-depth dialogue. Yet the study results did not confirm this assumption. Very few of my online acquaintances posted comments. I personally knew two commenters from the random sample who posted comments. I greatly appreciated their support, but the comments did not advance the discussion by engaging with content. One comment came from an acquaintance whom I had met in the video blogging community outside of YouTube; it read: “congrats, this is awesome!!!” Presumably the congratulations had to do with being featured on the YouTube welcome page. The other was a comment from someone whom I had interviewed in San Francisco. This comment was part of a thread in which the commenter argued with another commenter who had posted insulting remarks. Although I appreciated

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