Cartographies of Connection: A Study and Conceptualisation of User-Object Relations

Abstract

A prominent leader within the contemporary digital media landscape, the social media platform YouTube possesses noteworthy influential capacity to shape the platform’s over 2.5 billion users. Primarily functioning around video sharing, YouTube offers its widespread and diverse userbase a place to engage with uploaded audiovisual content in a manner which, as I shall argue, shapes how we come to understand both the video material, and users themselves. To substantiate this claim, in the first chapter of this thesis, I employ a material culture studies approach to users and YouTube videos, framing YouTube videos as ‘digital objects’. I specifically conceptualise the relationship between users and digital objects as ‘user-object relations’, underscoring their intense entanglement as manifesting as a process of becoming with one another. This understanding of mutual becoming importantly foregrounds my further conceptualisation of user-object relations as mutually constructive and constitutive on an ontological level. As such, I implicate both users and digital objects as key in understanding one another’s epistemological identities. To demonstrate how users and digital objects come to shape one another, my second chapter introduces and investigates ‘relational modes’ as designed platform-embedded mediators which configure the intertwined and complex user-object relations highlighted within my thesis. I specifically argue that relational modes act as connective pathways that characterise user-object relations as intensely temporally complex. In supporting this claim, I select, present, and examine several relational modes and how they articulate intensely complex user-object temporalities. Within this examination, I employ digital ethnographic methods and platform studies to underscore how these relational modes are designed to particularise certain kinds of user behaviour, and the relationship they form with digital objects. My research joins ongoing academic discussion within material culture studies regarding digital environments and objects, while also offering novel specificity to YouTube and its platform affordances in a manner which enables newfound application of material culture studies scholarship. Far from limited by the platform-specificity, I maintain that my conceptualisation of user-object relations also carries implications for future research regarding users and their interaction within digital environments by offering a valuable tool for understanding and emphasising users’ relationships with objects across a variety of digital environments.