Apr. 19, 2007: Katynka Martínez on "Pacman, MacArthur Park, and the Minutemen: Video games by LA Latino Youth" and Patricia Lange on "The Fractalization of the Public and Private on YouTube"04.19.07 | |
Speaker: Katynka Z. Martínez's areas of specialization include media studies, Latino cultural studies, feminist theory, and post-colonial studies of race and ethnicity. She is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the ACC.
Patricia G. Lange's areas of specialization include Internet communication, semiotics, identity, visual anthropology, science and technology studies, and anthropology of art. Lange is a Postdoctoral Fellow as well.
Abstract: (Lange) The public/private “dichotomy” is a long-standing concept in social research. Notably, the terms are co-constitutive; it is impossible to understand what is considered public without understanding what is considered private. Any juxtaposition is relative and changes in meaning according to context. For example, video sharing sites such as YouTube are considered public sites since they enable a wide number and range of participants to share videos with the world. Yet, participants can also restrict access to videos to private networks of friends. Public and private juxtapositions such as these repeat on YouTube in numerous ways at various levels of granularity. As Gal (2002) argues, the public/private dichotomy is more productively understood as a fractal distinction. This talk will explore gradations of public and private behavior on YouTube. It will analyze how participants reveal identity information within videos while video content remains relatively private since actions and symbols are not understood by most viewers. In this sense, YouTubers exhibit behavior that is “publicly private.” Similarly, the talk will also discuss video sharing that is “privately public” which involves encouraging large numbers of viewers while using techniques that limit access to participants’ offline identities. This talk challenges socio-spatial models that strictly delineate between public and private behavior and it shows how semiotic analysis can reveal how participants manipulate signs to create different kinds of social networks through media sharing.