ABSTRACT
Making video has empowered many people. Sharing intimate ideas and feelings through video has spurred the formation of intense connections to other people who experience similar concerns, or who benefit from learning about experiences outside of their daily lives. Conversely, media sharing has prompted deeply emotional responses from critics, some of whom are concerned with media’s role in creating a self-centered, narcissistic society. Whether hopeful or anxious, many discourses about media sharing in the United States share a “doxa” (Bourdieu 1977) or similar underlying assumption that video making begins and ends as an egocentric act. Ideas about online “participation” and “personally expressive media” (Lange 2014) imply an agentive centrality for media that does not always consider the parallel, intersecting, and contradictory forces that might influence how a video is made, or the interactive complications that participants face when trying to make and share mediated messages.
