Reading Lynsee’s blog post regarding Facebook and its effective method in engulfing us in adopting this social network as an autobiographical site inspired me to look into other sites that are at our disposal that can be adopted as a form of autobiography (Thanks Lynsee!). So I looked up the most popular sites of 2012 and sure enough after Google on top, Facebook in 2nd place, came Youtube in at bronze. I wanted to see how Youtube catered to our needs and how it could be seen as an emerging form life narrative.

One obvious feature that Youtube has (as it is owned by google) is its capability to link itself to other social networking sites such as Google+ and Facebook. You can login using your Google ID and this provides the personalized service. Quite contradictory to its mission statement of a “forum for people to connect, inform, and inspire others across the globe and acts as a distribution platform for original content creators”  where emphasis is put upon connecting us to new inspirations, like facebook, logging in introduces me to videos and publishers I have previously viewed. I can sense the dilemma of Youtube in it’s main interest in keeping the audience engaged as well as inspiring them to explore new videos. They find ways to cater us personally like many other social media. And this also reflects upon, Youtube’s evolution from sharing videos as opposed to consuming them. I know for a fact a majority of my peers never upload videos but enjoy Youtube as a personal tv channel.

However, new users without any social media connection would not find any forms of recommendation but popular (in terms of the number of views at recent times) on different popular categories such as Sports, Music, and Gaming such as below.

Sticking to my initial investigation of Youtube as an autobiography, I found a tab on my personalized Youtube of “what to watch”. I find the wording to very commanding and like tabs that read “you may also like” on facebook, it gives me the same personalized recommendation. When thinking about why it might be titled this way, I thought about the niche and kairos of Youtube. We often visit Youtube, at least personally I do, to disengage our brains to find something to laugh at or at least to engage our minds with something of our interest. In other words, its use is in leisure. And so “what to watch” can be appropriate in leading the viewer in a certain tangent to start the so called, seemingly neverending “Youtube streak”. Often, when we watch videos we see related videos and even recommended videos on the rights side and we just simply cannot stop.

Finally, a feature that I have never found out until this day was that Youtube had a dedicated page to myself. Although I have never uploaded a video through my account, it gives me a place for my very own chanel icon, chanel art, and even my thoughts. Hmmmm, I wonder where I have seen the same pattern… This ultimately symbolizes what we as users want out of such services. We no longer want to see just the most viral videos, we are inclined to be part of the experience of sharing and the transit of stories and life narratives.

So what do all of these points say about Youtube as a role as a life narrative? By picking out what to subscribe to, comment on, and share, we are able to create this catering personal service. Like facebook, it shapes our likes and dislikes and categorize them to our favor. In some ways, Youtube features are not so different from creating your own profile on facebook. And the fact that we can easily share these preferences through other social networking means establish the site as a form of autobiography purely through engagement with others in the forms such as commenting, subscribing, centered around the videos uploaded. And this in turn represents our demand in wanting to participate in the process of exchanging life narratives. The necessity to share and comment shows us how we express and shape our own opinion in relations to the material shared. The interaction in which Youtube provides in the various videos we watch is our life narrative on the web. The key features discussed above are just the tangible representation of our demand.

Youtube “Broadcast Yourself”

I have almost forgot about this motto. When Youtube began in February of 2005, its objective was solely to share videos, the website itself was not as user friendly as it is now in engaging others and if I recall correctly, it  certainly was not catered to our preferences. But where are we now? We can say that Youtube is still a tool of broadcasting ourselves but not in the means of uploading videos but in the form of engagement with others and establishing ourselves in the relations to the others on the web.