| dc.description.abstract | How do older people present and manage their age identities, and other social identities, through their YouTube videos and interactions with their viewers? Older YouTubers are a growing but frequently overlooked part of older people’s online presence. This thesis adopts a two phase approach, incorporating a quantitative descriptive analysis of a corpus of 121 YouTube videos by people aged sixty and over, and an ethnomethodological analysis, and specifically a membership categorisation analysis, of two groups within the corpus, older women beauty vloggers and older men gun reviewers, and their commentators. The first study finds that older people make YouTube videos in a wide range of genres with viewers beyond their family and friends. The second study finds that older age categorisations are salient to older YouTubers and their commentators and they present and manage their identities through video production resources as well as through linguistic and embodied resources. Older YouTubers making beauty vlogs and gun review videos invoke their age and length of experience to build common ground with their viewers and to assert their epistemic rights to make assessments, give advice and head off potential challenges to their epistemic authority. Age is not the only or main identity they orient to and older women frequently co-articulate the identities of age and gender. Overall this thesis makes contributions to studies of online identities by examining older people’s categorisation practices on YouTube and providing insights into YouTube as a setting for social interaction. It also contributes a novel methodological approach to studying YouTube. This thesis presents previously unknown descriptions of older YouTubers, their videos and engagement with their viewers. Methodologically it extends the ethnomethodological analysis of YouTube videos and comments. The findings demonstrate the importance of acknowledging that identities are interactionally presented and negotiated online. | en_US |
