Community Beyond the Five Boroughs (Lauren Mesley - Blog Post #10)

[image source]
 

This week I’m thinking about the ways in which YouTube fosters community on its platform. I’m not someone who watches YouTube often, but I don’t have cable, so when big events like the NYC mayoral election happen, I turn to YouTube to watch the news livestreams and get real time updates. 

I attended a watch party at my friend’s apartment on election night and we accidentally toggled the livestream comments so that they appeared on the screen in real time. For better or for worse, we could now see all the comments from viewers as they sent them. While my friends and I did not participate in the comments, I got to witness the banter of a community of people in support of mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani. People from all across the country were bonding over a mayoral candidate of a city they didn’t even live in. In fact, most of the commenters were not NYC residents. They highlighted their favorite parts of his victory speech and compared it to Cuomo’s concession speech; they bonded over their favorite content from Mamdani’s campaign; and lamented that they weren’t living in the five boroughs. There was a fair share of spam and instigators amid the comments, but the Mamdani-supporter community ignored them and carried on engaging with each other. 

If I had been watching the election on cable television, I would not have seen any of this! YouTube as a platform has created this affordance of commenting in live time and allows for people across the planet to bond over shared events of interest, and it made the election watch all the more entertaining and engaging. It also gave folks who don’t have any stake in the mayoral election feel like they were part of the conversation which strengthened engagement and support. Despite toggling the comments being an accident, it ended up being what made the night so memorable—that and Mamdani winning of course! 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Blogging through Social Platforms- Lizzy's First Blog Post

 There are many forms of blogging especially in today's social media world. What started as the world wide web in 1991 turned into many other social media pages to be created. If we truly think about it, all of these social media platforms are different ways of blogging. X  (Twitter) is short blog posts, Facebook is daily updates blogging, Instagram is picture blogging and Zoom is video blogging. That is basically all that these social medias are about. Sharing news, updates in our lives or telling the world news. This world of social media has completely turned our online resources around. The problem is we cannot believe everything we read on the internet, especially with social media platforms. There are many outside sources or fake news that can spread very fast. Fact checking is a new thing now on Facebook. It says that this page was fact checked. But was it really? Social media is widely becoming a major tool in our lives. This does not mean it should consume us. In a wo...
Read more

"Anonymous Member" (Lizzy Sblendorio Post #5)

Image
  The Anonymous Member on the social media app, Facebook, has become a new feature that many like but others do not. With this feature, members of Facebook can comment or post into a group anything under 'anonymous member'. Is this privacy setting too much or is it a good thing. One thing to remember is to never believe everything you read on the internet. What is a puzzle in itself is whether or not that person with a cute profile is actually the real person. What I mean by that is anyone can create a profile on Facebook, how do you know that all of their information is correct? You simply do not. Privacy has become a little too common in my opinion. There are not enough steps to verify your real information. That is why I do not like the anonymous feature on Facebook. What if someone says something hurtful or a threat and they are listed as a anonymous member? Yeah it can trace back to their normal profile but what if that person does not exist. Being invisible is all over so...
Read more

Users of the World, Unite! Review (Zoe Manalo Post #3)

  Users of the World, Unite! What Kaplan & Haenlein Teach Us About Social Media Zoe Manalo (Post #3) For this week I wanted to focus on one of the readings. When we think of social media today, it may feel like it's been around for awhile. Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and the list goes on. But back in 2010, Andreas Kaplan and Michael Haenlein published an articled titled Users of the World, Unite! that helped define what social media is and why it matters. Now it's 2025 and their article still shapes how we think about online platforms.  Kaplan and Haenlein described social media as a group of Interned based applications built on the Web 2.0., where users create and share information. They don't just consume what they come across. This shift from doom scrolling, or passive to active participation is what makes social media a tool. Kaplan and Haenlein broke social media into six categories: collaborative projects, blogs and microblog, content communities, social network...
Read more