YouTube Creates Communities

The video sharing site of YouTube provides a platform for people to create and upload content and to connect with people all around the world. Created in 2005 and bought by Google in 2006, YouTube sports the slogan ‘Broadcast Yourself’, encouraging the upload of user-generated video content.

Benedict Anderson used the term “imagined communities” to describe the sense of companionship and connection that is felt with social groups to which you may have no physical contact with. This knowledge and feeling of companionship is felt through things such as virtual or online communities. YouTube is a prime example of online imagined communities through the relationship between the content creator and the audience, as well as between individual audience members.

jccaylen (2013, January 15). You Are All My Friends. Retrieved November 1, 2013, from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1UPLDqI_1Bo
In this YouTube video, the content creator chats to the audience as friends.

YouTube provides the platform for content creators, or ‘vloggers’, to communicate with audiences all around the world. The conversational style of videos that the majority of vloggers upload to YouTube provides viewers with an insight into the personality and life of the vlogger. Vloggers speak directly to their audience, albeit through a camera, and are therefore able to establish a close ‘friendship’ with their viewers. For example, a common video created by vloggers are ‘ask’ videos in which they take questions that their viewers have asked them and make it into a video. This demonstrates the communication and connection between creator and viewer.

JacksGap (2013, January 27). Ask Jack 2. Retrieved November 1, 2013, from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymPi0bXQLZA

This video is an example of an 'ask' video.

The simple feature of the commenting system of YouTube plays a huge role in the formation of communities. The fact that viewers can comment on a video and reply to other people’s comments results in communication amongst audiences as well as communication between vloggers and the audience. Vloggers will often ask the audience questions in their videos, requesting that they leave their answers in the comment section. This creates a two-way communication format in which vloggers communicate through video and viewers communicate back through comments. The communication facilitated through the comments on YouTube therefore helps to create this sense of an imagined community online. The following images taken form the comments of YouTube videos demonstrates this relationship and communication.

Responses to Existential Crisis, danisnotonfire (2013), YouTube, accessed 1 November 2013.

Responses to Internet Support Group 2, danisnotonfire (2013), YouTube, accessed 1 November 2013.

Responses to You Are All My Friends, jccaylen (2013), YouTube, accessed 1 November 2013.

Since each vlogger has their own YouTube channel to which they upload their videos, and audience members are able to subscribe and regularly watch these videos, a community of viewers surrounding a certain vlogger emerges. Vloggers sometimes give their audience a collective name to which they affectionately use, hence creating the sense of a close-knit circle of ‘friends’ surrounding a certain content creator. Conversation often strikes up in the comments of videos between like-minded viewers who were drawn to the same vlogger, again creating this imagined online community around a YouTube content creator. The following images demonstrates the communication between viewers in the comments of videos.

Responses to Friend Mail, ItsWayPastMyBedTime (2013), YouTube, accessed 1 November 2013.

Responses to Existential Crisis, danisnotonfire (2013), YouTube, accessed 1 November 2013.

Whilst much of the development of the imagined communities surrounding vloggers is created on the site of YouTube, it also extends across many other social media sites. Sites such as Twitter allow viewers to communicate with vloggers, as well as allowing vloggers to keep their viewers up-to-date with their daily activities and information regarding their YouTube channel. The blogging site Tumblr provides a platform for viewers to come together and create their own content surrounding their favourite vloggers, such as the creation of GIFs from videos or fan fiction stories. The imagined communities created on YouTube are enhanced and strengthened by these various other social media sites.

Whilst a majority of the time the imagined communities created by YouTube stay within the virtual world, there are cases in which they are extended to actual ‘real life’ situations. A key example is through the creation of merchandise. One of the developing trends amongst vloggers is the creation and selling of merchandise, such as t-shirts, wristbands and posters, each with a particular catch phrase or symbol which is an established and known reference amongst viewers. If a viewer were to see someone wearing the merchandise of a vlogger that they watched, a sense of connection and companionship towards this person would be felt, through the understanding that they are both part of the same online community.

Through the simple medium of videos, YouTube creates expensive online communities. Whether it be vloggers communicating to their audiences through their videos, or viewers communicating in the comment section of videos, YouTube enables people from all around the world to connect and communicate and is a fundamental example of the nature of imagined communities.