YouTube as a Performative Arena
The video sharing site YouTube is used by huge numbers of young people in the roles of consumers and producers of content and meaning. The site hosts more than 120,000,000 video clips, and its users represent a wide variety of nationalities, religions, ethnic backgrounds, identities and lifestyles. Due to the scale of YouTube it is hard to see how a tangible sense of actual community could be created within the site. Using on- and offline ethnographic data in the form of footage, interviews and patterns of community interaction (favoriting, subscribing, commenting, rating, and video replies), this chapter presents the results of a case study that aims to analyze how a specific interest group with a certain national anchoring (Swedish parkour youth) deal with the vastness and complexity of YouTube in creating a sense of identity and community in relation to their specialized interest.