Sociologický časopis / Czech Sociological Review 2019, 55(2): 135-160 | DOI: 10.13060/00380288.2019.55.2.456

Youtubing as the Construction, Destruction and Restoration of Privacy

Lukáš Slavík, Pavel Pospěch

Fakulta sociálních studií, Masarykova univerzita, Brno

The study focuses on privacy in online social networks. It presents an empirical analysis of youtubers, a group that has not yet been studied in the Czech social sciences. Using interpretive phenomenological analysis and in-depth interviews, we show that there is a typical 'career' trajectory that youtubers proceed along, whose structure is determined by experiences of breach of privacy and by mechanisms of reparation. These mechanisms and practices must be employed in order to resolve a fundamental tension between the demand for self-disclosure, arising out of confessional culture and the ideology of authenticity, and the parallel demand for retaining privacy. Breach of privacy is conceptualised as a violation of the equilibrium of its three constitutive elements: content, border, and context. Such situations are experienced as threats to the identity of the youtubers, who seek to avoid these threats by means of reparation practices, changes in how they perform privacy, and the use of what we call tools of controlled (in)accessibility. Unlike normative critiques that lament the loss of privacy on social networks, this article concludes that youtubers are highly competent guardians of their own performed privacy.

Keywords: privacy, social networks, youth, breach of privacy, youtubers

Published: April 1, 2019Show citation