Reciprocities and tensions also appear on YouTube in the form of struggles over what should be kept or deleted from what Jean Burgess and Joshua Green call an “accidental archive.” Although they were speaking about uploaded videos, their term applies to comments and video responses as well. Specifically, the concern addressed here has to do with how or whether interactions-as-things should be persistently kept on the site. Once affective feelings, thoughts, and feedback are inscribed as text and video responses on YouTube, they are things that have specific sequential histories and interactive contexts. Scholars argue that things have biographies that, when they are exchanged in reciprocal interactions, remain with the objects (e.g., Osteen; Kopytoff). Examples include sacred relics, family heirlooms, and other objects that are inalienably associated with former owners, practices, and interactional moments. In a sense, affects translated into comments and videos are inalienable, in that they are associated with the person who has given “gifts” of attention and commentary to others on the site. Even the exact same text comment, such as “This is an excellent video,” may have different interpersonal meanings when they are issued by different people. For instance, such praise may have different connotations coming from a famous YouTuber versus a close friend.
Both YouTube and individual participants may remove unwanted comments-as-things and videos-as-things from the site, for a variety of reasons. YouTube may choose to remove (or hide in the case of spam) particular videos, soundtracks of videos, comments, and channel pages that violate their terms of service. In a way, YouTube structurally offers a kind of reciprocity—they will provide a free platform (at least as of this writing in June 2010) for video exchange and interaction provided that their terms of service are not violated. However, what YouTube “owes” participants is what Radin would call a contested category that signifies incomplete commodification. Even though it takes place in a commercially-driven structure, people may assign different meanings to YouTube's structurally available features such as text comments.
In interviews and in text comments posted to videos, YouTube participants list a variety of reasons why they sometimes feel motivated to delete videos, comments, or even their whole account. In addition to removing hateful comments as noted above, videos may also be removed through glitches (both YouTube- and user-generated) and over video makers’ concerns about repercussions from violating copyright rules. Other issues include lack of viewership; concerns about privacy or self protection (as when someone detects that sensitive information inadvertently slipped into a video); a desire to reinvent one’s channel or online persona; or concerns or embarrassment over quality levels in videos appearing early in an uploader’s oeuvre.
Discussions of things like “immaterial labor” and “affective labor” can weightlessly characterize effort that is often, in fact, interpersonally instantiated in artifacts such as comments that can be saved or deleted in particular circumstances. A semiotic analogy may be made in terms of transmission of aesthetic qualities. The color red, for instance, cannot be given, only an object that is red (Keane 187). In online milieu, feelings and ideas are distributed through something that can later be manipulated by senders and receivers. Exactly what form things like support, critique, feedback, and other affective feelings take is quite significant to interactants. YouTube contains many inscribed indexes of friendships and interactions that have occurred on the site over time. Some of them have become famous within and beyond YouTube. For instance, funny videos have found their way into news reports or variety shows in ways that index certain cultural moments on the site. These indexes serve as touchstones for YouTube's cultural histories. Personal deletion choices may sometime serve to erase or complicate participants’ access to affective effort. Removals and erasures from these interactional sequences often have emotional consequences.
Whether or not collective inscriptions of sociality represent a kind of “interactional archive” depends how one uses the term “archive,” in either its colloquial connotation as a mere collection, or in the historian’s sense of a persistent, organized, and standardized collection of curated materials. Burgess and Green have dubbed YouTube an “accidental archive” (87-90) in that the site did not anticipate that legions of participants would, à la Benkler or Jenkins, devote considerable time and energy not only uploading videos as cultural materials, but also cataloging, organizing, curating, and describing them. Removal of copyrighted and other interactional materials can cause considerable grief and distress within a social group that looks to YouTube to be a stable archive of their interpersonal, reciprocal, affective effort. Indeed deletions can lead to a change in motivation for interacting on YouTube, such as leaving the site altogether or withholding certain levels of affective effort.
Tensions about deletions are well articulated in a video called “A Rant for Renetto…,” which was posted by OhCurt on August 16, 2009. As of January 9, 2010, this video received 683 views, 4 video responses, 139 text comments and a 5 star rating (which is coded as Awesome!) with 110 ratings. In this video, OhCurt, who is part of the YouTube partner program, talks about his frustration with how people become “delete happy.” He “rants” about how people seem to blithely delete videos without considering the impact on people and on the interactional, historical archive that such removals entail. One of the problems is that when a video is deleted, so too are all the text comments that were posted to that video. Further, although video responses remain on YouTube, they are no longer linked to the original video, which has been deleted. Video responses are still available on each of the original responder’s channel page, but the intertextual link between responses and the original video to which they responded is severed.
In his video, OhCurt dubs these “orphaned” videos. Such removals produce inconsistencies in the “interactional archive” that render the whole series of interactions-as-things less personal than when the biography of the interaction is integrally maintained. When comments are deleted, the commenter may feel disappointed or betrayed. One commenter to his video even asserted that such removals “violate the spirit of YouTube.” In his video, OhCurt explains his frustration:
OhCurt: Once upon a time there used to be more interaction; it used to be more where you would see video responses to and from people and at some point people started just doing their own thing and going for the views and the, [the] subscribers. “Rate, comment, subscribe,” and all that bull crap! (sighs) And so we’ve gotten away from that. You don’t see too many video responses any more…There are certain people I will never do video responses for again because when you look back on my channel and you see how many videos were actually done in response to something else, where you’re watching it and you think to yourself, “What’s he talking about? What is this? This is like half of a joke. I don’t get it, there’s nothing for me to click on to see what this is a response to, this is, there’s, I don’t know what’s going on.” That’s because there are certain people who are so delete happy…[they] just love to delete their videos, so I have a slew of orphaned video responses, and I will not add to that list by responding to certain people ever again!
As mentioned above, people have many reasons for deleting a video; some of them involve legitimate fears such as repercussions from copyright issues or security concerns. In the comments to the videos, OhCurt expresses sympathy for many of these concerns, as he himself has deleted videos for similar reasons. It is significant that he has deleted the videos even though he is keenly aware that many of them respond to other videos. His point is not to fault individuals but to express frustration over what it means to lose the community’s instantiations of interactional reciprocity over which people have exerted personalized effort. It is as if an arrangement of reciprocity is assumed; if people take the time to post text comments or videos, the understanding is that they will be left on the site and respected if at all possible. In addition, he argues that it degrades the quality of the content of the informational thread by removing parts in a sequence of interaction, thus rendering discourse threads less coherent or even unintelligible.
One of the major reasons for deletions that people list in text comments on OhCurt’s video and in ethnographic interviews has to do with maintaining one’s reputation in a way that resembles the aesthetic reputational sensitivity in Becker’s concept of an “art world.” Here, in the “media world” of YouTube, video makers are also often viewers who critique, appraise, and otherwise judge people’s video-based artifacts of creativity and self expression. Contrary to popular opinion, press reports, and even some academic treatments, YouTube is not simply made of a hopeless batch of exceedingly poor videos that out number high-quality professional works (Keen; Long; Kinder; Sherman). Long argues that YouTube simply encourages “lame personal video contributions and pathetic searches for friendship” (Long). Sherman asserts that YouTube videos contain no “aesthetics,” but rather exhibit only a kind of "anesthetic" which is crude, lacks "aesthetic awareness," and "numbs or subdues perception" (163).
However, quite a range of quality exists on YouTube, just as it does in professional filmmaking milieu. Individual YouTube participants often see improvement in their work over time. Video creators have told me that they also enjoy seeing their fellow creators improve, and they can detect specific improvements as a video maker becomes more experienced. For a number of people, making videos frequently is seen as one way to improve one’s craft. Indeed the late director Anthony Minghella, the Academy Award-winning director of The English Patient said in an interview that many people in the film-viewing public are actually quite “film literate,” as they are “steeped in the literacy of the moving image” (Hoyle).
On the one hand, it is not surprising that one of the reasons that YouTube participants may wish to delete videos is that they feel self-conscious about the quality of prior work. As one commenter to OhCurt’s video put it:
I think I've only deleted 3 or 4 videos max during my time on [YouTube] and I get relatively few responses. That said, I took them down because I just didn't consider them good enough...but maybe that was being unfair to myself because when originally posted I was proud of them...
This commenter is careful to note that they have only deleted a few videos, and even these received few responses, thus their social transgression is not severe. Notably, when the videos were originally posted, this creator felt a sense of pride. Some people feel that YouTube is a kind of open, networked, “sketchbook” where people can experiment with their creativity and receive feedback. Over time, as more skills are learned, this poster felt that older material was not “good enough” to exhibit publicly. In other commenters’ accounts and justifications, some people said they only removed videos with few or no comments. Some admitted that they did not stop to consider that the comments’ continuing existence might be socially important. Still others were well aware that they were “orphaning” videos and removing text comments from the interactional archive when they deleted a video, but their needs outweighed reciprocal concerns.
Participants who deleted videos for reasons of reputational quality arguably privileged a sense of personal, creative integrity over honoring the reciprocal affective effort that their fellow YouTube participants took the time and trouble to provide them (without being compensated). Is it possible that such participants were exploited by their fellow YouTube participants? The video creators received what they needed in terms of support, critique, or feedback, but deleted the effort when it suited them. As has been observed, YouTube contributors are concerned about issues of quality in their work (Lange "Publicly;" Müller). For some people, it is ultimately worse (for the individual and possibly also for YouTube as a whole, depending upon how much participants strive to improve YouTube’s online reputation) to leave up sub par videos than to remove reciprocal indexes of affective effort. They are willing to remove these substandard videos, even though this practice may vex those who spent considerable energy and time in viewing and commenting on the videos, and supporting—in a more personal way—the creative efforts of their fellow YouTubers.