… Like No One Is Watching: Taking Digital Obscura Seriously

… Like No One Is Watching:Taking Digital Obscura Seriously Lauren S. Berliner (bio) In the early days, before thumbs-up buttons and YouTube TV, subscription channels, and monetization, YouTube was the primordial soup of content. Significance was determined by the individual viewer's opinion, or by video artists such as Natalie Bookchin, whose multichannel supercuts of trends helped audiences notice similarities across types of posts, such as dancing or making confessions.1 For a time, YouTube arguably captured snippets of everyday life, or at least everyday media production, evoking home video in both style and content. YouTube was a repository of everyday performance, gesturing toward connection with others rather than toward a like and subscribe prerogative or the hope of monetization, corporate sponsorship, or fame. As other platforms such as Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook grew, the content you were likely to find and be recommended on YouTube transformed into increasingly self-conscious productions that reflected professional production styles and cultural zeitgeists. The platform also became a popular source for information searching. The unpredicted election of Donald J. Trump drew increased attention to user-produced content spread, End Page 164 particularly ideology and (mis)information. Average citizens grew increasingly aware of the role that algorithms play in what they see and do not see online.2 In the commodified internet space, uploaded media almost always has the market potential to become the next viral video or meme.3 Creators and influencers, who now number more than fifty million around the world, are proprietors of the "fastest-growing type of small business," according to a report last year by SignalFire, a venture capital firm.4 With hundreds of thousands of videos now uploaded every hour, not everything can go viral. What's more, not everything gets watched. So many production tropes and genres have proliferated globally on YouTube, TikTok, and other video sharing platforms. However, there remains a tremendous amount of media content that neither circulates nor adheres to existing categories. A plethora of YouTube videos have only a handful of views, but they will likely stay on the site in perpetuity. This material is public and indexed by search engines, but it is cast aside by algorithms in response to the video's initial viewership or metadata, which render the content invisible in search results or viewing suggestions. It is precisely their lack of spreadability that pushes these videos further below what freelance writer and artist Joe Viex refers to as the "epidermal layer of YouTube" where the "recommended for you" content resides.5 In 2016, Viex coined the term the lonely web to refer to media content that exists in "the murky space between the mainstream and the deep webs. This media is public and indexed by search engines, but broadcast to a tiny audience, algorithmically filtered out, and/or difficult to find using traditional search techniques."6 I call online user-produced audiovisual media that has been uploaded online but not viewed or circulated beyond the maker and their immediate, already-invested audience digital obscura. Far from a place of lack, one assumed to be always searching in vain for an audience, digital obscura can teach us about the internet and ourselves.7 What might such media teach us about the themes, identities, and production practices that escape reception and representation, and how do technical systems such as algorithms and other back-end functionalities structure meaning about digital media artifacts? What is revealed by the existence and obfuscation of digital obscura End Page 165 under an algorithmic penumbra? I contend that studying unwatched digital media yields productive possibilities for media research, expanding our understanding of how people are using the internet. What's more, searching for and viewing unwatched digital media requires us to embrace different viewing practices that shed light on how current platform functionalities structure our viewing habits, social media streams, and psyches. The content on YouTube that exists but goes unwatched is diverse. Picture a video that simply shows an arc of urine hitting the drain of a urinal from the point of view of the person urinating; a couple dancing to the melody of their Samsung clothes dryer cycle completion tune; an overexposed video of...