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YouTube is one of the world's most popular websites and hosts numerous amateur and professional videos. Comments on these videos might be researched to give insights into audience reactions to important issues or particular videos. Yet, little is known about YouTube discussions in general: how frequent they are, who typically participates, and the role of sentiment. This article fills this gap through an analysis of large samples of text comments on YouTube videos. The results identify patterns and give some benchmarks against which future YouTube research into individual videos can be compared. For instance, the typical YouTube comment was mildly positive, was posted by a 29-year-old male, and contained 58 characters. About 23% of comments in the complete comment sets were replies to previous comments. There was no typical density of discussion on YouTube videos in the sense of the proportion of replies to other comments: videos with both few and many replies were common. The YouTube audience engaged with each other disproportionately when making negative comments, however; positive comments elicited few replies. The biggest trigger of discussion seemed to be religion, whereas the videos attracting the least discussion were predominantly from the Music, Comedy, and How to & Style categories. This suggests different audience uses for YouTube, from passive entertainment to active debating.

Mike Thelwall, Farida Vis Purpose: Despite the ongoing shift from text-based to image-based communication in the social web, supported by the affordances of smartphones, little is known about the new image sharing practices. Both gender and platform type seem likely to be important, but it is unclear how. Design/methodology/approach: This article surveys an age-balanced sample of UK Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat and WhatsApp image sharers with a range of exploratory questions about platform use, privacy, interactions, technology use and profile pictures. Findings: Females shared photos more often overall and shared images more frequently on Snapchat, but males shared more images on Twitter, particularly for hobbies. Females also tended to have more privacy-related concerns but were more willing, in principle, to share pictures of their children. Females also interacted more through others' images by liking and commenting on them. Both genders used supporting apps but in different ways: females applied filters and posted to albums whereas males retouched photos and used photo organising apps. Finally, males were more likely to be alone in their profile pictures. Practical implications: Those designing visual social web communication strategies to reach out to users should consider the different ways in which platforms are used by males and females to optimise their message for their target audience. Social implications: There are clear gender and platform differences in visual communication strategies. Overall, males may tend to have more informational, and females more relationship-based, skills or needs. Originality/value: This is the first detailed survey of electronic image sharing practices and the first to systematically compare the current generation of platforms.

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This paper looks at how data is ‘made’, by whom and how. Rather than assuming data already exists ‘out there’, waiting to simply be recovered and turned into findings, the paper examines how data is co–produced through dynamic research intersections. A particular focus is the intersections between the application programming interface (API), the researcher collecting the data as well as the tools used to process it. In light of this, this paper offers three new ways to define and think about Big Data and proposes a series of practical suggestions for making data.

Fitna, is a 2008 short film made by a Dutch member of parliament to support his fight against Islam.It shows shocking footage of terrorism, violence and women's oppression and claims that these are inherent to Islam. The film caused immense controversy and mobilized people across the world to produce and upload their own views to YouTube. In this article we analyze these videos using different theoretical models of democratic interaction, and distinguishing between antagonism, 'agonism' and dialogue. On the basis of a cybermetric network analysis we find that the videos are mostly isolated reactions on the film. Only 13 % or fewer of the posters interacted with each other through comments, subscriptions or 'friendship'. These interactions could be qualified as antagonistic or agonistic, but very rarely involved dialogue. We therefore conclude that YouTube enabled a multiplication of views rather than an exchange or dialogue between them.[147] host of user-generated video reactions possible. This resulted in an even greater novelty: a global public debate conducted through visual media. This visual debate is the topic of this article. In a previous study of these video reactions, we established that their makers perform a political and/or religious self through their videos and assume a global audience to whom they want to speak. Most videos express a desire to make a connection to geographically dispersed others in what we called a possible act of (global) citizenship (Van Zoonen, Vis and Mihelj, 2010). Yet, we also concluded that for such an act to become meaningful, it needed to be seen, listened to and acted upon by others, in some form of re-action or interaction. Whether and how this happened, and which views were shared and contested forms the general question of this paper. We will first examine the notions of re-action and interaction through the the theoretical frameworks of political, religious and Web 2.0 studies. Then, we will present the combination of research methods through which we examined the video exchanges and networks. iv We will conclude the analysis by asking whether and how the videos constitute a 'video sphere' for different sorts of political and religious interaction. Antagonism, agonism and dialogueIt should come as little surprise that the Fitna controversy was aired on the internet. This is for two reasons. First, from its beginning, the internet has hosted religious websites, forums, chat rooms, email lists and so on (O' Leary and Brasher, 1996). Internet users regularly list religion among their While public sphere theory -originating from Habermas' seminal work, but developed, adjusted and contested ever since -is often employed to embed these kinds of questions, Papacharissi (2009) has argued that it probably does not offer the most helpful perspective for understanding the kinds of engagement occurring on the internet, whether in its 1.0 or 2.0 variety. She argues that blogging and vlogging are best qualified as 'civic narcissism' because they are mostly means of self-...

Twitter is used by a substantial minority of the populations of many countries to share short messages, sometimes including images. Nevertheless, despite some research into specific images, such as selfies, and a few news stories about specific tweeted photographs, little is known about the types of images that are routinely shared. In response, this article reports a content analysis of random samples of 800 images tweeted from the UK or USA during a week at the end of 2014. Although most images were photographs, a substantial minority were hybrid or layered image forms: phone screenshots, collages, captioned pictures, and pictures of text messages. About half were primarily of one or more people, including 10% that were selfies, but a wide variety of other things were also pictured. Some of the images were for advertising or to share a joke but in most cases the purpose of the tweet seemed to be to share the minutiae of daily lives, performing the function of chat or gossip, sometimes in innovative ways.