This week I would like to do something different, a bit of an opinion piece on privacy and its boundaries with YouTube Content Creators. I was inspired by reading a CSO’s article by Joan Goodchild which talked broadly about the different privacy challenges that come with Content Creator’s unique job. Her description was spot on when she commented that “Unlike television and movie stars, these online celebrities face a different kind of privacy challenge because, by nature of the work they do, they are expected to be accessible and to interact with fans.”
Let’s face it, we have become obsessed with these online personalities. We have become so encaptured by this sense of connectedness to the people we see behind the screen.These people go through life and the world’s issues with us; we find those we relate to and grow along side them. And the effect is only amplified by the fact that this industry is run on a total lack of privacy.
For some reason us humans are endlessly curious about the lives of other humans. Some of the most subscribed to content are vlogs of people grocery shopping, cleaning house, walking their dogs, and just living life! It goes so far that it is a common joke that fans would rather watch a live-stream of their favorite Content Creator eating their breakfast cereal rather than a video they have spent weeks working on!
Fans are curious about every aspect of these Creators lives, they want to see them at all their best and all their worse. For these Content Creators, being themselves is their full time job. YouTubers are expected to be active on not just YouTube, but almost every social media, and at all times of the day. Their business model works on the absence of privacy, so much so that if certain parts of their lives are kept private, fans will even go lengths to write up what they believe, or want to dream, is happening when the camera isn’t on.
Commonly called “fan-fiction” this kind of writing was created to continue the stories of fictional characters once their series was over, however now it has turned into not only a concurring supplement to content, but has extended to write about real people. For Content Creators, their livelihoods have turned from a lack of privacy, to no privacy, to somehow the creation of negative privacy as fans online start creating their narratives for them as if they were fictional characters themselves.
So where does the line of real connection and fictional character cross? What drives us to be so utterly obsessed with knowing every detail about these people’s lives? On one end of the internet we have people fighting for more privacy, while turning around discussing extremely private details of other people’s lives on a public forum. The internet changes every day and the jobs that come along seem to be growing and falling before we can fully understand them. As we continue to discuss and work out privacy safety in other areas of the internet I am interested to see how this will affect the methods of privacy sharing as well.
Source: Goodchild, J. (2016, June 23). Privacy, risk and trolls: Dealing with the security challenges of YouTube fame. Retrieved November 26, 2017, from https://www.csoonline.com/article/3088429/social-networking/privacy-risk-and-trolls-dealing-with-the-security-challenges-of-youtube-fame.html
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