Publicly Private and Privately Public: Social Networking on YouTube

YouTube is a public video-sharing website where people can experience varying degrees of engagement with videos, ranging from casual viewing to sharing videos in order to maintain social relationships. Based on a one-year ethnographic project, this article analyzes how YouTube participants developed and maintained social networks by manipulating physical and interpretive access to their videos. The analysis reveals how circulating and sharing videos reflects different social relationships among youth. It also identifies varying degrees of “publicness” in video sharing. Some participants exhibited “publicly private” behavior, in which video makers’ identities were revealed, but content was relatively private…