YouTube Study Complete

This research transformed from a study about YouTube to a study about vlogging (hosted on YouTube). Over 8 weeks, I got to know some vloggers by interviewing and watching their videos, etc. And in the spirit of participant observation, I created some vlogs of my own.

My basic observation is that vlogging is an empowering experience for people who, in the digital age, can now create their own media content and speak to potential mass audiences whereas before, average people were mainly consumers of media. Emancipate the people from the shackles of mainstream media by uploading “football hits man in groin” videos! It’s actually much much more than that. But seeing as how i just wrote 20 pages on it, forgive me for not going into details.

Read the entire paper via the “Vlogging” link at the top of the page. Or click here lazy. Please email me for the password.

This is where the rubber meets the road

The other day my neighbor handed me this article from NYU Sociologist Eric Klinenberg in the March/April Mother Jones magazine. Here’s the headline/byline:

Breaking the News: It’s not the Internet that’s killing newspapers. It’s the equity-chasing investors and their friends at the FCC who have put outsize profits before a free press.

This piece is excellent – it most likely stems from Klinenberg’s new book Fighting For Air: The Battle to Control America’s Media. I haven’t read it yet, but it seems to encapsulate a topic I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, which is incorporating ethnographic research and media analysis to form a basis for institutional media critique. I need to find out who else is doing this, but clearly Klinenberg is a master in this area. I heard him interviewed on Bob McChesney’s Media Matters radio program, he described the goal of book is to

turn media consolidation from an abstraction into the kind of thing we recognize as affecting our lives. No matter how many times we see those charts of media ownership that show how 5 or 6 companies dominate the system and own lots and lots of subsidiaries, a key challenge for those who care about this issue is to tell human stories about it that really resonate, especially with people who aren’t already convinced that there’s a problem. The kind of media system that we have deprives us of these stories, so we need to find a way to get them told.

Here is where qualitative approaches – ethnographic works – get at the heart of issues like media ownership and telecom policy that can seem so far removed from everyday life.

This is a model to emulate…

YouTube study update

For the past six weeks I’ve been trying to look more closely at vlogging (video web logging) on YouTube – a project for my qualitative methods class. I’ve been watching a lot of vlogs and then starting conversations with some of the people that create them. Some of the folks I contacted didn’t respond, but a good amount of people did. And while some responses were short, sort of courteous replies, others turned into extended correspondence. It’s been great to do this.

The paper is meant to be an ethnography, broadly defined as an interpretative study of a group of people, social practices, and their context. Its due in 10 days and its now clear that it will not read like a traditional ethnographic work, but this project has given me an introduction to a different sort of lens for looking at media. I will post some bits of it, which always works out better when it is written… more about this later.

This is a link to the channel for my YouTube accoun. What’s more exciting than vlogs about vlogs?