The Pursuit of Busyness: Studying Productivity and Work-Life Balance on YouTube

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The Pursuit of Busyness: Studying Productivity and

Work-Life Balance on YouTube

Alicja Zak

Date of completion: June 23, 2020 Supervised by: Guillén Torres

Master’s Thesis

New Media and Digital Culture

Department of Media Studies : Graduate School of Humanities University of Amsterdam

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The Pursuit of Busyness: Studying Productivity and

Work-Life Balance on YouTube

Abstract

Work, productivity, and busyness are key words that are frequently mentioned in American culture. Many individuals value work culture, often regarding busyness as a status symbol. As a result of this busy lifestyle, Americans often struggle to achieve a work-life balance. A popular new media streaming platform used by millions daily for entertainment, educational, and leisure purposes is YouTube. Through the examination of the video content and the comment space resulting from the query ‘productivity’, this research examines narratives about work culture and work-life balance taking place on the platform. The results suggest that YouTube is increasingly being used for educational and self-improvement purposes in the context of productivity. The study of the video content and the overwhelmingly positive comment space reveals and confirms ideas of self-improvement through an emphasis on work and productivity. Due to the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic at the time of research, the results are discussed in the current global context.

Key words

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iii TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract ... ii

List of Figures ... v

List of Tables ... vii

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION ... 1

Thesis research question and goals ... 2

CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW ... 4

Social Values of Work ... 4

Work ethic ... 4

Individualistic vs. collectivistic ... 6

A lifelong journey to the top... 7

(Perceived) busyness as a status symbol ... 8

Overcoming work culture ... 10

Work- life balance and productivity ... 10

Platforms ... 12

How to study YouTube videos ... 12

Affordances ... 12

Participatory culture ... 14

YouTube as social media entertainment ... 15

The influence of algorithms ... 17

How to study the YouTube comment space ... 19

Virtual communities ... 19

Comments and content moderation ... 20

CHAPTER 3: METHOD ... 22

YouTube and Digital Methods ... 22

About YouTube ... 22

About digital methods ... 22

Studying YouTube with digital methods ... 23

Methodology ... 24

Data collection ... 24

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CHAPTER 4: RESULTS ... 27

Findings from video content ... 27

Gender differences ... 27

YouTube Algorithm ... 29

Strategies used by creators to drive traffic to their channels ... 30

Categorizing the video ... 30

Action-oriented verbs ... 31

Tutorial nouns & numbers ... 33

Addressing a weakness: procrastination ... 34

Icons of success ... 35

Time as an asset ... 36

Discussion ... 37

Individual and internal motivation ... 37

Work-life balance ... 38

Social media entertainment & micro-celebrities ... 38

YouTube as a space for self-improvement ... 39

Findings from the comment space ... 41

Comment counts ... 41

Typology of comments ... 42

Discussion ... 50

YouTube as a community discussion forum ... 50

YouTube as a place for knowledge and education... 51

YouTube as a positive comment space ... 52

YouTube as an advertising/marketing platform ... 52

2019-2020 Coronavirus Pandemic ... 53

Coronavirus findings and discussion ... 54

Limitations ... 57

CONCLUSION ... 59

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v List of Figures

Figure 1: Total 100 videos divided by gender, self-coded. 28

Figure 2: Video categories by Gender. Blue is male, pink is female, yellow is both. 28

Figure 3: Views, likes, and comments over time 29

Figure 4: YouTube categories, by percentile, of the 100 videos studied. Other categories not labeled include Science & Technology, Entertainment, News & Politics, and Comedy. 31 Figure 5: A cluster map of popular and related search terms in the video titles 32

Figure 6: Comments and views count by video category label 41

Figure 7: Source: YouTube 43

Figure 9 & Figure 10: Source: YouTube 43

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Figure 34: An example of the virtual community at work. 51

Figure 35: How many adults use the internet during the coronavirus outbreak. Source: Pew

Research Center, 2020 53

Figure 36 & Figure 37: Tables with the counts of how often a word appeared in the video titles, before March 1 and after March 1. Source: Voyant Tools, 2020. 54 Figure 38 & Figure 39: A web of related words in video titles before and after March 1. Source:

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vii List of Tables

Table 1: Video titles with action-verbs ... 32

Table 2: Video titles featuring numbers and tutorial nouns ... 33

Table 3: Video titles referring to procrastination and/or laziness ... 34

Table 4: Video titles that mention successful figures, in bold ... 35

Table 5: Video titles that noted an added tool, in bold ... 36

Table 6: Video titles that refer to time and time management, with keywords in bold ... 37

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1 CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION

Work has a cultural dimension that is represented differently around the world. American society is built on the ethos of work, where work has become an integral part of one’s identity. In the United States, work has been influenced by an Anglo-Saxon Protestant work ethic that

originated before and during colonial days (Weber, 1920). Weber (1920) explained that an individual’s value and integrity is based on the person’s willingness to work hard. This mentality of hard work has prevailed for years and is still the dominant culture today, varying by specific geographic regions in the U.S. One aspect of work ethic is productivity and in the U.S., people frequently refer to themselves as being busy. Festini et al. (2019) note that busyness is a topic that the public frequently reflects upon and is worthy of more understanding. It is defined as “the perception of the density of events and tasks to perform in one’s daily life- in other words, how crowded one perceives one’s schedule to be” (Festini et al. 2019, 2-3).

On the contrary, work-life balance “is a broad concept including proper prioritizing between career and ambition on one hand, compared with pleasure, leisure, family and spiritual development on the other” (Gulavani 2020, 2285). Many people struggle to achieve this balance, as finding time for family, friends, community participation, personal growth and self-care proves to be demanding and challenging for those with busy schedules. Work–family balance was defined as “the degree to which an individual’s effectiveness and satisfaction in the role of work and family domain are well-matched with the individual’s life priorities” (Gulavani 2020, 2286).

The ideas of work, productivity and work-life balance have been previously represented in traditional media such as TV, newspapers, and radio. However, linguist Anne O’Keefe (2011, 441) notes that, “Advances in technology have greatly offset the ephemerality factor that used to relate to media discourse, especially radio and television”. New media is now making it possible to broadcast thoughts far and wide and allowing audiences to respond to what they see, hear or read, instantly (O’Keeffe 2011, 449).

An example of a contemporary new media platform with a large influence is YouTube. YouTube is a popular video sharing and streaming website founded in 2005 that many people use on a daily basis. The platform currently has over 2 billion users as of 2019, with local versions in over 100 countries, in approximately 80 different languages (About YouTube: press

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2 site). The site is free to use and any individual with Internet access may upload and share videos with others, as well as comment on video content. With the advent of new media technologies such as YouTube, the concept of work-life balance and productivity is being represented in new ways every day, which is what I seek to explore in this project.

Thesis research question and goals

This topic was chosen due to my fascination with the ways in which the values of work and productivity permeate American society. I wanted to see whether this fixation was reflected in individual’s motivations and behaviors. The goal of my study was to determine what popular narratives are shared among users of the YouTube platform, based on the search query

‘productivity’.

Previous new media research has focused on YouTube and the YouTube comment space only. Prior research in the fields of psychology and economics have studied work-life balance and busyness as a subject. However, little is known about how busyness and productivity are represented through the new media lens, so in this study I focus on the convergence of both topics.

Through the study of social media platforms, researchers can ethnographically learn information about a society and how people interact in virtual spaces. Usage of the internet and social media platforms is increasing by the day and the use of these platforms has influence beyond the digital space and into the social conscience. Therefore, the digital world holds important tools to help understand changes in societies and cultures in the present day and has implications for the future. In this research YouTube is a discursive device, meaning that user words and comments are analyzed to derive conclusions about societal views on the topic. I arrived at the following research questions:

• How do narratives on YouTube reflect societal values of productivity, work-life balance and busyness in the United States?

How are these values represented in the content of the videos? How are they represented in the comment space?

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3 The research questions will be answered using quantitative and qualitative research methods. The methodology used in this study is Digital Methods. Through examining 100 videos from YouTube with the search query ‘productivity’, conclusions will be drawn from the analysis of the content.

The paper starts with a theoretical overview of the extant literature about work-life balance, productivity, and busyness, both in the United States and in a global context. Next, new-media-related research on the study of the YouTube platform will be explained, including ways to study both the content of the videos as well as the comments below the videos. The

methodology will be explained in further detail as well.

A new and unexpected factor arose while conducting research for this study in early 2020: the COVID-19 Coronavirus Pandemic took over the world. This not only altered people’s ways of living, working, and thinking, but had a direct impact on this study’s dataset, as

YouTube is constantly being updated with new content. Thus, I briefly engage with this

temporary shift as well. The findings section will then discuss the analysis of the dataset and the overall implications of productivity and work-life balance in the United States. Finally, the discussion will present limitations and implications for future research, followed by the conclusion.

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4 CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW

The following literature review has two main sections relevant to this research. The first section focuses on the social values of work, providing a historical and cultural background in which to situate the reader. The second section focuses on new media literature, focusing on ways to study the YouTube platform.

The cultural ideals around work have various aspects specific to American values. In order to understand American society, one must be historically situated in time and culture and recognize the differences between individualistic and collectivistic approaches in society. The high regard for individualism is reflected in a person’s development throughout their lives. Competitiveness, busyness and productivity are regarded as status symbols in adult life.

The second part of the review focuses on new media literature about online platforms. Ways of studying the YouTube platform are through the concept of affordances, the lens of participatory culture, and an explanation of how YouTube’s ranking algorithms work. The YouTube comment space is a separate area of study, where the definition of what a comment is, the concept of a virtual community, and ways to moderate content will be discussed. The body of research on YouTube is much more recent due to the fact that the platform has only existed for 15 years, and is frequently being updated, changed, and altered in real time.

Social Values of Work

Work ethic

Work habits arise from societal values of how and in what way people should act and behave, and these cultural expectations differ around the world. This behavior is taught starting when children first start to go to school, and they grow up in a specific system that rewards certain behaviors and not others. Researchers Amy McCortney and Dennis Engels (2003, 134) define work ethic as “a construct composed of two distinct parts: attitudes or values and the behaviors that outwardly reflect these attitudes or values”. Work ethic consists of two primary aspects: its internal characteristics, reflected in individuals, and the external characteristics, outwardly exhibited in work behaviors (McCortney and Engels 2003, 134).

The United States mainly has a work ethic that is derived from the Protestant system brought to the country by Northern Europeans and Anglo-Saxons. The theory of the Protestant work ethic was introduced by German sociologist, economist and politician Max Weber in his

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5 1905 book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, revised in 1920, and later translated to English in 1930. Weber explained that an individual’s value and integrity is based on the person’s willingness to work hard, and that this notion was an economic legacy of the ethos of the Protestant reformation (Smith and Smith 2011, 4). McCortney and Engels (2003, 134) note that “some traits associated with a strong work ethic include asceticism, integrity, independence, diligence, motivation, loyalty, and dependability”. In the United States, work is highly valued and often must come first to other priorities, sometimes even before family. McCortney and Engels (2003), mention that “As a dominant social norm in the United States, the "traditional" work ethic of job commitment and achievement, of short-term pain for long term gain, is often strongly held and highly valued” (135).

One important factor in American culture is the idea of social mobility. Many people believe that working a lot when they are young will help them achieved greater success when they are older. Business scholars Silvia Bellezza, Neeru Paharia, and Anat Keinan (2016, 121-22) note that “Social mobility is fundamental in American culture and is reflected in the ethos of the American Dream (Adams 1931), which proposes that regardless of social class, one has the opportunity for social affirmation based on hard work. A person who believes in a mobile social society will view work as a way to achieve their dreams of gaining a higher status.

Srnicek and Williams (2015) note that the submission to work is in fact implicit in many religions and not just in Protestantism (124). “These ethics demand dedication to one’s work regardless of the nature of the job, instilling a moral imperative that drudgery should be valued. While originating in religious ideas about ensuring a better afterlife, the goal of the work ethic was eventually replaced with a secular devotion to improvement in this life” (124). According to these values, hard work and ‘proving oneself’ was and still is a way to live the best possible life.

Srnicek and Williams (2015, 125) also argue that “the central ideological support for the work ethic is that remuneration be tied to suffering” and that many people believe that they “must endure through work before they can receive wages, they must prove their worthiness before the eyes of capital”. The more a person works and the harder they do so, the greater their ‘worthiness’ will be, whether in the eyes of God or other individuals.

Research has also been done regarding an internal drive versus external gratification. There is a strong correlation between the Protestant work ethic and having an internal locus of control. “In relation to work, individuals with an internal locus of control can be deemed likely to

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6 believe that success or failure in work is due to individual efforts, rather than socioeconomic status, events, luck, or other external factors” (McCortney and Engels 2003, 135). A person’s internal motivation to succeed may be different from how they outwardly project their image onto others around them. People can claim to be ‘busy’ all the time but this may reflect what others in their environment want to hear and not necessarily what the person actually believes. Busyness as a status symbol will be further explained in a subsequent section.

Individualistic vs. collectivistic

One factor that impacts how a person or group of people perceives the world can broadly be attributed to living in one of two types of societies. People in certain cultures and countries believe more in luck or chance as the biggest factor as to whether they achieve their definition of ‘success’. This is also related to whether a country is considered individualistic (various Western countries) or collectivistic (common in Eastern cultures). These two parts of the spectrum are a method used by social psychologists and international education specialists to study cultural responses to phenomena and the way they relate to others. For example, psychologists Abdel-Fattah Darwish and Günter Huber (2003, 47-48) note the differences between individualistic and collectivistic cultures below:

Individualism is defined as a situation in which people are concerned with themselves and close family members only, while collectivism is defined as a situation in which people feel they belong to larger in-groups or collectives which care for them in exchange for loyalty—and vice versa (Hofstede & Bond, 1984). Collectivism can also be defined as a cluster of attitudes, beliefs and behaviors toward a wide variety of people

Examples of individualistic cultures include the United States, whose roots and historical traditions come from colonization by Great Britain. Therefore, other countries colonized by the British, such as Canada and Australia share similar individualistic values. Darwish and Huber (2003, 48) note that, “Individualistic cultures emphasize promoting the individual’s and his/her immediate family’s self-interest, personal autonomy, privacy, self-realization, individual

initiative, independence, individual decision making, an understanding of personal identity as the sum of attributes of the individual, and less concern about the needs and interests of others.”

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A lifelong journey to the top

Since the moral and ethical values of work are engrained into the society and into the culture’s mentality, the push towards hard work often begins at a young age. This ‘race to the top’ in countries with a strong work ethic is evident as early as pre-school, with certain top schools in the country already having a waitlist to gain competitive entry. As Gross (2018, par. 17) notes, “Many parents think that getting their kids into one of the “Baby Ivies” will help them

get into one of the top private schools for kindergarten through senior year”. The fierce

competition by parents is instilled in the minds of young children, often from the moment they are born.

Many kids are tested from a young age to evaluate not only their personal performance, but also the performance of their school district (Raymo, Somers, and Partridge 2019, 562). Psychologists Raymo, Somers, and Partridge (2019, 563) studied test anxiety in middle school students and the mental health implications of their stress. They cite a comprehensive literature review from McDonald (2001), noting factors related to test anxiety which included: (1) academic expectations of parents (with children fearing the consequences of not meeting these expectations), (2) being praised for achievement rather than effort (leading to differences in motivation and attribution) and (3), having a high level of comparison with peers and/or being in a highly competitive classroom environment (563). All three of these factors slowly lead children to be taught that their performance and achievements are what matter and that they must stand out among their peers.

This competition is further reinforced in high school, where performing their best and doing the most, whether that is academic or extra-curricular sports or activities, will be the way to gain entry into competitive colleges. Sociologists Jill Yavorsky and Claudia Buchmann (2019) studied gender differences and academic achievements among American high school students. They note that there is a wide body of research stating that students’ academic performance in middle school and high school predicts their future educational and life accomplishments and good performance is positively associated with the enrollment and completion of college (661). Teenagers in high school may be likely to grow up in a competitive environment not only

focused on achieving success in academics, but in other realms of life, such as their popularity or athletic performance.

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8 Once in college, many top universities and colleges proudly note that they have a ‘work-hard- play hard’ mentality in their school, whereby putting in many hours of hard labor will make them deserving of being able to enjoy their leisure time or party. Psychologists Aarsen and Crimi (2016) studied the ‘work hard-play hard’ hypothesis to see if people who work harder do in fact enjoy their time more. The authors note that “The traditional inference [to work hard- play hard culture], involves a work ethic, with the principal focus on virtue in hard work, and

connecting this […] to associated value in leisure (enjoyable free-time pursuits)” (Aarsen and Crimi 2016, 7). However, the modern reference remains uncertain, so they set out to study it. From their sample of Canadian undergraduate students, they found that there is strong evidence for the fact that working harder allows students to enjoy their leisure activities more (12). Although their study featured Canadian students, the cultures of the United States and Canada are very similar with regards to work-ethic.

By the time these young adults become professionals in the work force, some become employees of a company that continues to abides by the ‘work hard-play hard’ lifestyle. Many employers are now realizing the benefits to employees having a ‘fun’ workspace to help empower and motivate their staff. “Balanced employees tend to feel more motivated and less stressed out at work. This helps to increase the organizational productivity and builds a sustainable workforce” (Gulavani 2020, 2285).

(Perceived) busyness as a status symbol

Psychologists Festini et al. (2019, 111-12) noted that despite the relevance of busyness to daily life, research on the topic is surprisingly limited because most research has been focused on individual activities rather than an understanding of perceived busyness. They defined ‘busyness’ as “the perception of the density of events and tasks to perform in one’s daily life, in other

words, how crowded one perceives one’s schedule to be” (112). Since busyness is a concept that the public frequently reflects upon, it is worthy of a more detailed scientific understanding (Festini et al. 2019, 113) In the study, people self-reported their perceived levels of busyness, allowing the researchers to draw conclusions based on age, gender, and measures of lifestyle engagement.

The results found that the busyness was associated with the personality measures of greater agreeableness, extraversion, openness, conscientiousness (122). They hypothesized that “extraversion and openness are more likely to result in “self-generated” busyness because people

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9 with these personality characteristics are more inclined to seek out social activities and new thrills” and the fact that “neuroticism was an independent predictor suggests that certain aspects of busyness also may be due to heightened anxiety” (Festini et al. 2019, 26). Here busyness is perceived as being a form of a coping strategy, allowing people to occupy their minds away from stressful life experiences. The age differences documented reported that busyness peaked in 30-year-olds, showed age-related decreases until age 60, and then remained stable through the 80s (124).

Festini et al. (2019) included measures of lifestyle engagement to determine what types of activities were associated with busyness. People who partook in more novel activities, social activities, hobbies, who were more highly educated, and who possessed a higher need for cognition tended to report greater busyness (127). Engaging in these activities supports the notion that busyness may serve as an indicator of daily engagement.

Authors Bellezza, Paharia, and Keinan (2016) argue that “a busy and overworked lifestyle, rather than a leisurely life, has become an aspirational status symbol” (118). “In contemporary American culture, complaining about being busy and working all the time has become an increasingly widespread phenomenon” (119). In their research, Bellezza, Paharia, and Keinan (2016) had a variety of different methods to analyze data of how people are regarded when they self-referred to themselves as busy. This included bragging about busyness through social media, and perceived social mobility based on dimensions of busyness. They propose that in advanced economies, long hours of work and busyness has become a positive status symbol due to the possession of desired human capital characteristics, leading to the perception of being in high demand and scarce in the job market, leading to elevated status (120-1). The authors found that Americans who perceive society to be mobile, with the belief that work may lead to social affirmation, are very likely to interpret busyness as a positive signal of status (119).

The research showcased hitherto belongs to the fields of psychology and business school studies, however new media approaches have also been used to study busyness. Wajcman (2019) studied how high-status achievers in the technology scene use calendars and other digital devices to organize their time. She interviewed engineers in Silicon Valley to see what themes arise when speaking of maximizing productivity. She noted, “The shared narrative of my interviewees revolved around the urgent need to utilize time because they were so busy. However, they were also heavily invested in identifying themselves as constantly busy, this being a signifier of high

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10 status” (1281). This quote addresses the paradox that referring to oneself as being busy is not necessarily equivalent to the amount of work that someone is in fact doing.

Overcoming work culture

There is often stigma and pressure associated with being lazy, not getting work done, or taking ‘the easy way out’. In the book “Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World without Work”, authors Srnicek and Williams (2015) write about the implications of a hypothetical world that is fully automated and people are theoretically able to enjoy their free time without working. They argue that there are a variety of logistical problems with this utopian vision, however one proposition is the implementation of a Universal Basic Income (UBI). In one of their arguments as to what impediments stand in the way of the UBI becoming a reality, they note that the most difficult hurdles would not be economic ones, but political and cultural ones (123). “Cultural struggles will persist because work is so deeply ingrained into our very identity” (123). The authors note that “One of the most difficult problems in implementing a UBI and building post-work society will be overcoming the pervasive pressure to submit to the post-work ethic” (123).

In the past and today, there are strict divisions between those who work and those who are on welfare. In the United States this was further reinforced by racial biases, “since welfare was seen as a black issue, and whites were loath to be associated with it.” (124). In a sense, without work people would not know who they are or what to do with their free time.

Work- life balance and productivity

The concept of work-life balance is the attempt to balance both a person’s professional work and career ambitions with their personal home, family and leisure time (Gulavani 2020, 2285). Many people would like to maintain an equilibrium where one does not take over the other, however many often struggle with this task.

Historically, according to Kelliher, Richardson, and Boiarntseva (2018, 99), the relationship between work and life first became a focus of interest as growing numbers of women sought paid employment outside of the home, following the Second World War, as they had to incorporate work with the responsibility of child care. By the 1970’s the definition

expanded to include dual career couples and by the turn of the 21st century, the field had become multidisciplinary (Kelliher, Richardson, and Boiarntseva 2018, 99). Work-life balance is

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11 Western perspective, namely a United States-based one. Srnicek and Williams (2015, 15)

comment on the present-day working situation in the United States by saying:

There has been a progressive elimination of the work–life distinction, with work coming to permeate every aspect of our waking lives. Many of us are now tied to work all the time, with emails, phone calls, texts and job anxieties impinging upon us constantly. Salaried workers are often compelled to work unrecognized overtime, while many workers feel the social pressure to be seen working long hours. These demands mean that the average full-time US worker in fact logs closer to forty-seven hours a week. On top of this, a vast amount of work is unpaid and therefore uncounted in official data

Due to the fact that the United States is a capitalist society where work often is praised and placed above other values such as family life or leisure time, balance may be hard to find. Working too many hours can lead people to feel chronically stressed, which contributes to various negative long-term health effects. A 2018 Forbes article cites that millennials are “projected to take up 75% of the workforce by 2025” (Kohll 2018, par. 1). Many companies have found themselves changing their priorities in order to appeal to a younger generation that values a certain type of healthy, balanced, lifestyle over one of stability and chronic stress that was found to be prevalent in older generations, such as Baby Boomers (Kohll 2018, par. 5-6).

Many people believe that having a higher productivity will allow a person to do a given task in a shorter amount of time, hence giving them more free time. Economists Nick Bloom, Tobias Kretschmer, and John Van Reenan (2009) conducted a research study on the effects of work life balance on workplace performance, using a data set of over 700 firms in Europe and the United States. They note that “Perhaps the most important issue is the association of WLB with productivity… Firms with better management practices will tend to have both higher productivity and better work- life balance. This gives rise to the mistaken impression that better WLB causes higher productivity” (34-35).

The section of literature aimed to explain the context of working culture, perceived busyness in an individualistic society, and interest in work-life balance. The following section focuses on the new media aspects of ways to study YouTube through scholarly research.

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12 Platforms

How to study YouTube videos

In order to analytically study YouTube videos, users must understand a variety of concepts that influence the way one looks at content on YouTube. The concepts of affordances, algorithms, and participatory culture are introduced in the following sections, including the social entertainment aspects of YouTube.

Affordances

Platforms, including YouTube, are strategically designed to allow for certain actions while prohibiting or discouraging other practices. A platform provides the user a variety of ways and options in which they can engage with it. In a sense, the platform allows a user to conduct an action, which in media studies is known as an affordance. “Originally developed in the field of ecological psychology (Gibson 2015) and later adopted in design studies (Norman 1988), the concept of affordance is generally used to describe what material artifacts such as media technologies allow people to do” (Bucher & Helmond 2017, 3).

Any website affords the user a variety of ways through which to find, browse, and interact with content. For the particular case of YouTube, this means, for example, providing multiple ways through which a user can find a video on YouTube. The simplest way is to query a keyword in the search box at the top of the page, which returns back a list of ranked videos, automatically sorted by ‘relevance’, with the ability to filter or specify other options. The YouTube homepage also recommends videos to its users, depending on their prior browsing history and search queries. Once a user is watching a video they can select the ‘auto-play’ button to automatically play the next related videos, which appear in a list on the right-hand corner. On some platforms users can share videos but not post any comments. On others they can only post comments but not content. The platform is free for all to watch, even without creating an

account. Once a user creates an account there are a variety of actions they can take, such as post content, tag it with hashtags, like and dislike other user’s videos, and leave comments. Users are also able to reply to comments and like and dislike comments. YouTube also makes it

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13 from copying, circulating, and reusing content (Gillespie 2018, 179). Nothing about the

platform’s design is done accidentally or without a purpose.

However, the user must be aware that the function exists in the first place in order to make use of it properly. “An artifact’s functions are only accessible to a particular subject if that subject knows the functions are available. This is key to Norman’s (1999) distinction between real and perceived affordances—with the former representing features of an artifact and the latter representing a subject’s awareness of said features” (Davis and Chouinard 2016, 245). The authors provide the example of a mobile phone camera only being able to produce videos for users who are aware of the camera’s presence and functions (245). Platforms like YouTube frequently provide tutorials on how to use their site properly and what options (affordances) are available for users to make use of. Whenever new features are updated, they often highlight them to users with boxes, pop-ups, or instructions on how to use the new tool.

Langley and Leyshon (2016, 1) speak about the economics of interactive online communities and how platforms enroll users through a participatory economic culture. They comment that platform intermediation combines three ‘layers’, each of which can be applied to YouTube. The first is a network or community layer, which consists of platform participants and the relationships between them. In the case of YouTube this is the platform itself and the

participants are users. Second, an infrastructure layer, which is made up of software tools, rules and services- on YouTube this consists of all of the affordances of the platform- uploading videos, commenting, etc. The third and last layer is data, which allows the platform to attempt to match supply with demand. This data is studied both by content creators as they have access to the analytics of their channel, and by YouTube developers who are frequently seeking to develop new features that might appeal to audiences based on their activity online (Langley and Leyshon 2016, 7).

Platforms allow users certain types of actions, while discouraging others. It is important for people to note that “A feature is clearly not just a feature. The symbols and the connotations they carry matter. Pressing a button means something; it mediates and communicates.” (Bucher & Helmond 2017, 2). The authors conclude that even within the field of media and

communication studies “there is no single way that scholars have come to understand the concept of affordance” since there are a variety of interpretations (Bucher & Helmond 2017, 3).

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Participatory culture

YouTube not only strives to be a popular platform, but one that people will continue to return to due to the abundant amount of virtual communities that have been formed over time, encompassing a multitude of subjects. “YouTube is much more than an online platform for sharing and broadcasting content. Its unique technical and social features support the formation of a participatory culture among the members of its community” (Chau 2011, 67).

Jenkins (2016) introduced the term ‘participatory culture’ to explain how many people, who would have previously been spectators or consumers, are now able to both produce their own content and contribute to other user’s content, providing a two-way communication channel. The term ‘participatory culture’ lies in contrast with previously held notions of passive media spectatorship. “Rather than talking about media producers and consumers as occupying separate roles, we might now see them as participants who interact with each other according to a new set of rules that nobody fully understands” (Jenkins 2016, 3). These complex rules are what

researchers aim to study.

In the traditional media era of TV and radio, media was considered a one-way communication channel with the newscaster or producer providing the information to the spectators, while they passively took absorbed the information. However, media researchers Croteau, Hoynes, and Milan (2012, 148) highlight that “one of the defining characteristics of the Internet as a media- and particularly Web 2.0- is that users are often the source of content”. Today, media is interactive and people who previously might not have had a voice have a chance to actively contribute their opinions, thoughts, and anecdotes to a platform, via the comments section. “By merging the technical aspects of youth as media creators with the social aspects of youth as social networkers, new media platforms such as YouTube offer a participatory culture in which to develop, interact, and learn.” (Chau 2011, 65)

Since many of YouTube’s content producers and users consist of a younger generation, this platform serves to uniquely highlight debates, discussions, and conversations happening in teenagers and young adults. “The participatory culture framework is relevant to youth

development researchers because it provides a lens to understand specific mechanisms that attract youth to collaborate and produce creative, self-expressive, and self-initiated media

products” (Chau 2011, 67). New media researchers Mar Guerrero-Pico, Maria-Jose Masanet, and Carlos Scolari (2019, 337) conducted a study on how teenagers aged 12-18 engage in

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15 participatory culture online. Their goal was to understand how they interact with media. One aspect of what they define as ‘transmedia skills’ is the production of content and sharing on web platforms and social media (337). “Social media (e.g. YouTube) are central territories of the new media landscape, a common place for young people to both post and view personal and amateur contents” (337). Guerrero-Pico, Masanet, and Scolari (2019, 338) underline that researchers such as Jenkins (2006) and Gee (2004) believed that “new participatory cultures represent ideal learning environments because they offer powerful opportunities for acquiring new skills.”.

Social media allows users, especially youth, to participate in and engage with social media and video platforms as a source of education outside the formal schooling system. Many people frequently view teenagers and young adults as ‘digital natives’, defined as someone who has grown up with the internet and digital technologies from an early age (Cambridge dictionary 2020). However, the authors point out that we must be careful making this generalization. Despite the fact that many teenagers can be considered ‘early adopters’ since they have been exposed to more social media throughout their lifetimes, not everyone has the same pace of learning, navigates through platforms in the same way, and they do not learn skills or share content in the same ways.

Guerrero-Pico, Masanet, and Scolari (2019) underline that there are implicit rules and behavior of various online platforms (348). Even though YouTube has community guidelines, they are just a starting point, as many videos, threads, and channels have their own sets of norms and rules of how to interact on and with the platform and other users. “Online norms are

powerful shapers of virtual behavior” (Croteau, Hoynes, and Milan 2012, 149). Participatory culture in the YouTube community has shaped online norms specific to that platform and sometimes even specific to a certain community.

YouTube as social media entertainment

For many audiences and particularly for youth, the YouTube platform has become a form of entertainment akin to what traditional television had been, providing a variety of

programming. It allows them to produce and consume content in a different way than previous generations. The concept of Social Media Entertainment (SME), introduced by Cunningham & Silver (2013, 71) is defined as “an emerging proto-industry based on previously amateur creators professionalizing and engaging in content innovation and media entrepreneurship across multiple social media platforms to aggregate global fan communities and incubate their own media

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16 brands”. Native-to online SME content types include vlogging, gameplay and do-it-yourself (DIY) style and beauty videos and differ from traditional media, including TV and film. (Cunningham & Craig 2017, 72).

Vlogging refers to video blogging, which is described as “user-generated videos of short duration that are distributed online where others may view, subscribe, or comment on them” (Snelson 2015, 322). Vloggers frequently use YouTube as their chosen platform, due to its popularity and global reach. The vlogs are often recorded in residential settings as shown in the background, with the presence of home furnishings and décor visible in the background. Snelson (2015, 322) notes that “deeper probing into the YouTube vlogosphere reveals that vloggers not only discuss many topics, but they do so in a wide array of settings and contexts.” Upon further review, the variability of types of vlogs becomes apparent when narrowed down by interest. The vlogs range from gardening to technology to moms and dads with daily vlog channels.

SME and vlogging place a high value on authenticity and community, making them appealing to viewers. As compared to traditional media where content is scripted and scenes are edited, YouTube vlogs provide the notion that the content creator is being their true authentic self, with various portions of their life purposely left unedited in order to appear “normal”. Many users of social media sites like YouTube are not professionals and content creation is not their main occupation (Croteau, Hoynes, and Milan 2012, 148). In recent years more and more people have been drawn to the platform following the success of other ‘average’ persons who

successfully became YouTube ‘stars’ through the building of their channels over time. With the top 10 ‘elite’ YouTubers making extraordinary amounts of income (between 5-15 million dollars), it may be an alluring ‘career’ for those interested in broadcasting and content creation (Geyser 2020, par. 27).

Although the majority of people with a YouTube channel will not reach over a million people, thousands of other channels are still making some form of profit due to sponsored posts, ad revenue, product placements, and collaborations (Geyser 2020, par. 24). The opportunity to make even a slight profit from a YouTube channel encourages many people to start sharing and posting their own content online with the only ‘requirement’ being to remain authentic.

Cunningham & Craig (2017 , 74) note that “Every SME creator is subject to a level of fan and subscriber response and feedback that, in its almost real-time intensity and transparency, is without parallel in screen entertainment.”

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17 A variety of those who produce content on YouTube, such as vloggers, can be defined as a ‘celebrity’ online. As defined by social media scholar Alice Marwick (2015), micro-celebrity is a “self-presentation technique in which people view themselves as a public persona to be consumed by others, use strategic intimacy to appeal to followers, and regard their

audience as fans” (Lewis 2020, 203). Lewis (2020) notes that the micro-celebrity uses a variety of practices adapted from traditional celebrity culture, enabling social media users to gain

attention and popularity (203). One such example would be to interact with followers and fans to make themselves seem desirable, even if they only have a few thousand subscribers. The term ‘micro-celebrity’ online refers to users of social media with niche audiences and followings, as well as to the processes they partake in to cultivate those audiences. (Lewis 2020, 203).

The influence of algorithms

Millions of YouTube users are contributing to the way recommendation algorithms and ranking systems work through interacting with the videos on the site. This technology is

important to understand because it has the ability to influence users based on the order in which videos are presented or recommended to the user. The ranking algorithm determines at what numerical position a video result, comment, or recommended channel will be. The higher the video or channel is ranked, the more visibility it will receive, leading to it having more users will click on it. According to new media scholars Bernhard Rieder, Ariadna Matamoros-Fernández, and Oscar Coromina (2018, 52), “The search feature is an area where the process of mediation or curation of content and, consequently, of perspectives or viewpoints, becomes highly explicit”.

The process of mediating and curating content is often organized by users themselves, as they produce mass amounts of data. Tarleton Gillespie (2018, 178), a known communication researcher who studies the implications of online media platforms, notes that the platform is designed as an “intricate, algorithmically manage visibility machine”. Platforms “organize visibility, not just by policy but by design: sorting and delivering information in the form of profiles, news feeds, threads, channels, categories, updates, notifications” (178). They are organized in a strategic and mathematical way “according to some calculation of interest, over some period of time, across some population of users; different results are shown to different users based on who and where they are.” (Gillespie 2018, 178)

Gillespie (2018) references communication scholar Taina Bucher by saying that social media platforms are “about not only the promise of visibility but also the threat of invisibility. If

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18 an algorithm doesn’t recognize you or your content as valuable, to others it’s as if you simply aren’t there at all” (178-9). This issue becomes very important to creators of content who want to maximize their chances of appearing high on an algorithmically managed list.

The other algorithm at work on YouTube is the recommendation algorithm for

subsequent videos. The recommended videos on the right side of a YouTube video’s page are often used to point viewers in the direction of related videos that they might also enjoy. The “up next” feature has a similar recommendatory purpose. In many cases YouTube is nudging users to click on the following video, asserting influence over the way in which users take in information while highlighting the tag ‘Recommended for you”. Even though the platform has specifically coded and designed artificial intelligence algorithms at work to provide recommendations, it is the users themselves who are contributing to rankings just by clicking a video, liking, or

responding to comments. The more ‘likeable’ the content is in people’s eyes, the higher it will be algorithmically ranked.

Yeung (2018, 118) devised the idea of the ‘hypernudge’, saying that “Big Data analytic nudges are extremely powerful and potent due to their networked, continuously updated, dynamic and pervasive nature (hence ‘hypernudge’)”. He notes that the order in which search results are presented to the user serve as a nudge in getting them to press one search result over the other. Yeung (2018) compares this to being in a cafeteria and being offered the option of a salad before a lasagna in order to promote healthier food choices (118). Giving users or customers a variety of options but placing certain ones before others gives them the illusion of free will. Therefore, the subtle influence of the person or platform providing the good/service is disguised within the user’s choice. Yeung (2018) warns us that “Although hypernudging entails the use of ‘soft’ power, it is extraordinarily strong. And, where power lies, there also lies the potential for overreaching, exploitation and abuse” (123).

Gillespie (2014, 167) writes, “Recommendation algorithms map our preferences against others, suggesting new or forgotten bits of culture for us to encounter”. Although these

recommendations are merely suggestions, they do provide a variety of options and a future path for the user to take—one they might not have found otherwise without the algorithm at work.

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19 How to study the YouTube comment space

While ways to study the content of YouTube were previously presented, the ways to study comments provide an insight into participatory culture happening in real-time on the platform. When studying these comments, it is important to start with the question: What is a comment on a video and why is it important? Reagle (2015, 16-17) defines the act of ‘comment’ as a genre of communication, that “is social, is meant to be seen by others, and is reactive: it follows or is in response to something and appears below a post on a blog, a book description on Amazon, or a video on YouTube”. The author writes that comments are short, asynchronous, and although they are considered to be reactive, “[they are] not always responsive or substantively engaging” (17). Comments are usually kept brief, yet some users try to test the site by seeing what the maximum character limit one may publish is.

The YouTube platform has been studied in a variety of literature and is frequently regarded as a space filled with toxicity, hostility, and not worthy of significant discussion (Murthy and Sharma 2019, 192). However, the comment space has not been academically studied in depth as much as the platform has. Murthy and Sharma (2019, 194) note that “YouTube has limited social networking features in comparison to other platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr” and that the interactions on the site are limited to 2-3 exchanges, therefore making them more difficult to study.

The comment space allows for a form of participatory culture and social media to take place on YouTube, as there are a range of interactions that are afforded by the platform. One such affordance is the ability to comment on videos. Other affordances include allowing users to reply to comments, and ‘like’ or ‘dislike’ the comments by providing a ‘thumbs up’ or ‘thumbs down’, respectively. The author of a video or channel has a variety of options for settings related to the moderation of the comments.

Virtual communities

Researchers Croteau, Hoynes, and Milan (2012, 302) note that media technologies have altered our sense of community. They cite Birkerts (1994) saying that “new media technologies created an entirely new social space, cyberspace, which allows for new forms of interaction with little connection to the physical world”. People are able to take on new identities in cyberspace,

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20 temporarily able to transcend the limits and the responsibilities of their physical environment (Croteau, Hoynes, and Milan 2012, 302).

The concept of a virtual community was introduced by Rheinhold (2000), suggesting that communities no longer need to be geographically based and that people all over the globe can become “virtual” neighbors through the space-bridging technology of the internet.” (Croteau, Hoynes, and Milan 2012, 302). Because this virtual community can now exist anywhere due to the availability of the internet, the reach of these videos and comments extends worldwide.

Virtual communities can be both positive and negative, as they add an anonymity factor to social media use. On one hand, they can be very positive spaces for people to share

experiences and advice. Authors Naslund et al. (2014, 1) studied peer support on YouTube and the comment space to examine the experiences of individuals with severe mental illness. They found that many use the comments section as a safe space for peer support through reciprocity, to learn from shared experiences, to provide hope for others, and to share strategies for coping with day-to-day challenges.

However, the comments section can also become a space publicly available for online aggression and abuse by harassing, critiquing, cyberbullying, stalking, blackmailing, or threatening people. The comments section as a mean space filled with haters and trolls was investigated by Sparby (2017, 3) stating that many Americans believe that anonymity is the problem. Sparby (2017, 145) notes that “All YouTubers receive some level of hate no matter how well they conform to societal expectations, but women and people of color receive

disproportionately more”. The influence of videos, comments, and people’s interactions on the platform can lead to serious potential negative real-life consequences if they are not properly resolved online.

Comments and content moderation

In the early days of the internet, users were allowed to post whatever comments they wanted to share, being able to hide behind a shield of anonymity. Negative or potentially harmful comments were not regulated in any meaningful way. However, platforms have increasingly been moderating the content that is posted on their site, including the comments section. Gillespie (2018, 115) notes that: “Platforms are made by the work that goes into content moderation, and they are not platforms without it”. An account holder’s options on YouTube

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21 include holding potentially inappropriate comments for review, holding all comments for review, allowing all comments, or turning off all comments (YouTube Help center, 2020).

When looking at the comment space on a video, one might notice that certain videos may appear to have a set number of comments. However, the actual number of displayed comments differs, often due to them having been flagged, pending approval, or completely withheld by the platform. “Flagging is now widespread across social media platforms, and has settled in as a norm in the logic of the social media interface, alongside “favoriting” and reposting” (Gillespie 2018, 128).

Initially, the role of eliminating concerning, inappropriate, and graphic content was the role of the employees working for a given platform, known as content moderators. However, this task increasingly began to be outsourced to all users of the platform as websites scaled up and the creation of new content grew exponentially. “Enlisting the crowd to police itself is now commonplace across social media platforms and, more broadly, the management of public information resources” (Gillespie 2018, 128). Gillespie (2018, 125) refers to the roles that people take to police and moderate content online as community managers.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) procedures are now expanding and becoming more prevalent, so the data flagged by users can teach a new system how to automatically pick up on these words, phrases, and terms that cause alarm. YouTube’s website even notes that their system is still learning: “YouTube’s system works to find potentially inappropriate comments, but it’s not always correct. As you review comments, the system gets better at finding comments to hold for review” (YouTube Help Center, 2020).

All in all, Reagle (2015, 18) concludes that “in sifting through the comments, we can learn much about ourselves and the ways that other people seek to exploit the value of our social selves”.

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22 CHAPTER 3: METHOD

YouTube and Digital Methods

About YouTube

YouTube is a popular video sharing and streaming website that many people use on a daily basis. The first video was uploaded to YouTube in April 2005 and the site has since grown exponentially in the fifteen years since (Rogers 2019, 426). Their website notes that “Over 2 Billion logged-in users visit YouTube each month and everyday people watch over a billion hours of video and generate billions of views.” YouTube’s initial offering was a platform from which to ‘broadcast yourself’, their official slogan, removed in 2011 (Rogers 2019, 423). Over the years the site grew rapidly to include music videos, pirated content, and eventually user-generated content featuring online personalities (Rogers 2019, 423).

YouTube’s About page notes that “YouTube, on mobile alone, reaches more people in this US audience than any other TV network”, referring to their primary user age group of 18-34-year old’s (About YouTube site, 2020). YouTube will most likely continue to grow rapidly as an online platform in the following years, so it is important for all people to understand what the implications and effects may have on citizens and society. A report from the Pew Research Center, a nonprofit fact tank organization, noted that as of 2019, 73% of the US adult population uses YouTube (Pew research center, 2019). Therefore, much of the content posted online has a day-to-day impact on ordinary citizens. Since many people intake information in a visual way, by studying YouTube it is possible to draw conclusions that might not be achieved by studying other mainly text-based platforms, such as Twitter.

About digital methods

The related concepts of busyness, work-life balance, and productivity have all been studied in the scope of social sciences and economics, however they have not yet been studied through the lens of the YouTube platform, using the digital methods approach. Led primarily by new media scholar Richard Rogers (2019, 33), digital methods are used for internet-related research and formally defined as “techniques for the study of societal change and cultural condition with online data”.

Digital methods differ from previous modes of examining data derived from the internet, as those were grounded in existing offline methodologies in the social sciences that were

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23 ‘migrated’ to a digital environment (Rogers 2009, 1). However, the digital methods approach repurposes online methods of studying digital objects (such as tags, time stamps, hyperlinks, like buttons) into a social research outlook and seeks to ground the findings online instead (Rogers 2019, 33). Rogers (2009, 1) emphasizes the distinction between objects and devices that were ‘born’ in the new medium, referring to them as ‘natively digital’.

Digital methods deals with broader societal issues, raising questions such as ‘how can one study social media to learn about society rather than about social media use?’ (MIT book review, 2019). Rogers (2019, 33) recognizes and notes the limitations of the digital methods approach, by citing factors such as the impermanent and unstable nature of data streams, and the issue of the quality of web data that is being constantly updated online.

The topic of busyness and work has been previously approached in the fields of

economics and psychology, however a new media exploration of platforms such as YouTube on the topic of busyness has not yet been undertaken. Chau (2011) researched participatory culture in youth on YouTube, however his study was conducted nine years ago and the new media platform has radically changed since then. Additionally, Bellezza, Paharia, and Keinan’s (2016, 123) analysis of celebrity tweets on the Twitter platform sought “to examine the frequency of complaints about busyness and lack of leisure on social media”. However, in my research I am more focused on the average individual who watches YouTube videos and often comments on videos.

Studying YouTube with digital methods

Ways to study YouTube as media with digital methods include (1) studying the ‘up next’ feature on related videos, (2) querying a search term and (3) studying a channel or multiple channels to see how the subscriptions are interconnected (Rogers 2019, 433).

In conducting this new media research, it is important to stay as objective as possible by removing certain search engine effects. However, Rogers (2019, 68) notes that there should be awareness of the ways in which search engine results get altered by products built into them (such as Google properties and Google user aids). These are referred to as ‘media effects’ that must be accounted for. Because YouTube is a Google product, the search query in YouTube has similar algorithmic capabilities to the Google search engine. Rogers (2019, 68) writes that more problematic issues arise with the effects of personalization, which is when a user logs in to their

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24 account and personalizes it, thus inadvertently becoming a co-author in the engine results

process.

Studying YouTube serves as a type of digital ethnography, which “has been used to great effect to document the diverse forms of social activity facilitated by digital media” (Hine 2017, 1). There are a variety of differing ways to do ethnography online, many of them frequently changing and being updated due to the novelty of digital technologies. Hine (2017, 1) focused on the term ‘virtual ethnography’ to demonstrate an approach that remained neutral about the nature of online interactions, treating the Internet as a cultural site and a cultural artifact. Therefore, studying online spaces is an important resource for understanding contemporary society.

Methodology

Through studying the top rated and liked comments on the top videos related to work and productivity, this paper aims to gain insight into the current conversations on this topic

happening on the platform and into the types of ways that people utilize the YouTube comment space. The purpose of this research is to see what narratives are present on YouTube about how societal values of productivity, work-life balance and busyness in the United States are

represented.

In order to answer the research question, the analysis was split into two spaces for

discourse analysis: the video content and the comments space. Both of the analyses are examined through the lens of text data. Online ethnographies are typically one of two types: participatory, where the researcher is involved in the community, or non-participatory, where the researcher records observations of behaviors in the community (Snelson 2015, 324). In this study the non-participatory approach was used, where the YouTube community was observed at a distance with no researcher participation.

Data collection

A research browser was used to minimize the influence of cookies on the computer. Using the YouTube Data Tools from the Digital Methods Initiative (DMI) at the University of Amsterdam the ‘Video List’ module option was selected, where one can define the parameters of what they wish to study (DMI 2020). The ‘search query’ option is used for this research, with the designated search query of ‘productivity’. The term productivity was chosen after prior searches with the query ‘work life balance’ and ‘busyness’. Due to the amount of relevant results

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25 available, the commentary on them, and the current relevance, ‘productivity’ was selected as being the most beneficial to study. The results for the ‘productivity’ query returned a spreadsheet list of the first 50 videos. The top 50 results were chosen, as opposed to the top 10 or 25, due to the fact that most users “ (a) click the top results, (b) have the results set to the default of ten, and (c) do not venture beyond one page of results” (Rogers 2019, 69). The effects of YouTube algorithm personalization vary greatly from individual to individual based on a user’s prior account activities, so by studying the top 50 videos, the potential search results of a variety of people were accounted for.

The parameters were further limited to a specific date range, which was split into two datasets, one before March 1 2020, and after March 1, until the date of the data collection, April 30. This specific date-range was selected due to the occurrence of the COVID-19 pandemic, which greatly altered the results of the previous dataset. Results focusing on the coronavirus pandemic can be found in the designated section in the findings and discussion. The resulting spreadsheet had 100 results of the search term ‘productivity’ with various available data points such as the date and time of publication, channel ID and title, video title, view count, like count, and comment count, among others.

The second object of study were the comments in the videos. For this, YouTube data tools were also used, with the “Video Info and Comments” module being of importance (DMI 2020). Each of the 100 video ID’s were pasted into the parameter, and a file containing all retrievable comments was created. The comments on the videos ranged from 8 comments on the least popular video to 52,000 comments on the most commented video.

Data analysis

The dataset was converted into a CSV (comma separated values) file and opened in Microsoft Excel in order to examine the video title, description, amount of comments, etc. Using the list of all 50 Video ID’s (unique identifiers assigned to each YouTube video), a Python script was created to download, clean, and print all of the YouTube auto-generated closed caption (CC) transcripts from the 50 YouTube videos. This was implemented using YouTube-dl, “a command-line program to download videos from YouTube.com and other video sites” (Garcia Gonzalez, youtube-dl developers 2020). After cleaning the text by removing irrelevant words such as cues for ‘music’ or ‘laughter’, timestamps, and other unnecessary coded word, they were saved as their own new text file. The 50 text files titles were then copied into the Voyant Tools website,

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26 an open source web-based reading and analysis environment for digital texts (Sinclair and

Rockwell 2020).

However, compiling all of the words from the videos proved to be very erroneous, because YouTube’s captions are not correct, so the analysis could not be performed. Instead, the videos were qualitatively coded, with the researcher taking notes on observations and the content of the videos. The videos were also coded according to gender, to identify any potential patterns in the data. The Voyant Tools tool was still used to paste the titles of all the videos to recognize frequent word use and to study trends.

The list of video comments was also compiled into one dataset using a Python script and pasted into Voyant Tools, which allows one to analyze the texts to find common trends, words, and patterns. However, during the process of analyzing all of the comments, it was noted that the majority of frequently used words were spam or filler words that did not yield any conclusive data. Therefore, the method was changed to analyze the top-listed comments for every video ID, scrolling down to not more than 20 top comments. Although the date ranges of the top-rated comments vary, the most popular ones hold greater significance because users are more likely to interact with them. These comments were then qualitatively analyzed to create a typology. At the end of the data collection, the data analysis results were presented graphically via Tableau data visualization software.

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27 CHAPTER 4: RESULTS

Findings from video content

Before conducting this research, the expected findings for the search query ‘productivity’ were to find a variety of different types of content, such as informational videos on the science of productivity, conferences, TED talks, or more academic videos. However, the results showed that most of the video uploads were video blogs (vlogs) and most of them were directed at helping an individual. The 100 videos ranged from 1.5 minutes to 33 minutes, and the total average was 11 minutes. Many videos were self-help “how to” videos such as ‘how to be more organized’ or ‘how to be more productive’. The videos often promoted actions such as to-do lists, calendars, or color coding, in order to be more efficient. During the COVID-19 pandemic the dataset shifted more towards home-related words, such as ‘how to work from home’ as this was not something many people were familiar with previously.

The majority of the vloggers were young, many in their late teens, 20’s, or early 30’s and the gender divide was almost exactly even. Many of them ran their own YouTube channel where they frequently publish content that is sponsored by external companies. Due to the fact that that they are sponsored and use the channel as a form of income, they must focus not only on their content production but also on the current marketing strategies in order for their videos to get ranked high enough for users to view them.

The following section explains gender differences noted in the study, as well as notes on the timing of the video and how it reflects the YouTube algorithm. The narratives regarding work-life balance intersected with and were reflected in strategies that creators used to draw traffic to their videos, which will be described in further detail.

Gender differences

When conducting a primary analysis on this dataset, one object of self-coding included identifying the video’s primary creator as male, female, or a video including both genders equally. These classifications should be interpreted with caution, as this is based on the researcher’s interpretation. The majority of the videos featured one person speaking and

presenting the information, however some videos were animated and included only a voiceover. One animated video featured both male and female voices, as shown in Figure 1 below.

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Figure 1: Total 100 videos divided by gender, self-coded.

When looking at the division of the video categories by gender in Figure 2 below, the education category is dominated by men, while the How To & Style as well as the People & Blogs section are dominated by women. It must be noted that the category assigned to a video is self-declared according to the creator, and is therefore subject to interpretation.