Participation framework underlying YouTube interaction

Drawing on the literature on interaction in new media and on participation models underlying (non)fictional multi-party media talk, this paper contributes to the burgeoning literature on computer-mediated communication. Specifically, this article advocates a new participatory framework holding for multi-party interaction on YouTube, which is compared to that underlying films and televised programmes. YouTube users’ participation is more complex than television viewers’, who are involved primarily as ratified hearers dubbed “recipients”. YouTubers, on the other hand, engage in asynchronous computer-mediated interaction, changing their participatory statuses at the production and reception ends. The extended participatory framework proposed here for YouTube resides in three levels of communication: the level of the speaker and hearers in video interaction, the level of the sender and the recipient of a YouTube video, and the level of YouTube speakers and hearers who post and read comments, respectively. These communicative levels are realised by: interactants in videos and the (collective) sender, i.e. the production crew (both typical also of televised films and broadcasts), together with YouTube users, who may be video interactants and/or senders, as well as take other participatory roles.