Join us for a special ARNIC seminar led by ARNIC research fellow Dr. Matt Rafalow from Google (YouTube).

Rafalow will be sharing findings from a few chapters of his book in development, You Like Me: How Audiences Shape Creativity Online. This manuscript draws on a mixed methods dataset he collected on YouTubers and their viewers, consisting of 223 interviews and 60,448 survey responses.

In his presentation, Rafalow will give a brief talk summarizing analysis from three book chapters for informal feedback and discussion, and to surface possible collaboration opportunities with students. In the first chapter, he’ll share an analysis revealing new ways audiences matter to cultural producers (YouTubers), underscoring how content genre augments the rules for creator-audience interaction. In the second chapter, he’ll share quantitative analyses that show how the costs and benefits of meeting these audience expectations vary by creator demographic, and in ways that lead to inequities. In the third, he shows some nascent results from a section of the book devoted to viewers, sharing mixed methods results before and after the onset of the pandemic to show how uses of YouTube shifted. Specifically, he finds that viewers have myriad reasons for watching YouTube videos, but consumption for the purposes of community and connection shifted over the pandemic.

Rafalow is a sociologist, a social scientist at Google (YouTube), and a research fellow at USC Annenberg. At Google, he manages a research team studying new experiences on YouTube. Most of his research focuses on digital inequality in education and through creative production online. He is the author of Digital Divisions: How Schools Create Inequality in the Tech Era (University of Chicago Press, 2020; winner of the CITAMS Best Book Award and Honorable Mention for Education Section’s Bourdieu Best Book Award), and is co-author of Affinity Online: How Connection and Shared Interests Fuel Learning (NYU Press, 2018). His work has appeared in journals such as the American Journal of Sociology, Educational Researcher, Symbolic Interaction, and Social Currents.

RSVP by emailing arnic@usc.edu by October 18.