How the Youtube Gaming Community is a Digital Public
Gaming, specifically gaming on Youtube, is something that is becoming more and more mainstream, and is also becoming more and more accepted as a career choice. A big reason for this is because the Youtube Gaming Community is a digital public, and (just like many other communities in social media, and social media itself) it is starting to be seen as such by more traditional media outlets and the general public. This article will go over what the Youtube Gaming Community is, what a digital public and a public sphere are, and why Youtube Gaming is a digital public.
So, what is The Youtube Gaming Community? The Youtube Gaming Community is one of the many communities on Youtube that is dedicated to a certain topic/interest. They have communities for gaming, music, movies, news, learning, sports, and more. Each of these communities are easy to find and are separated by tabs in the explore page of the Youtube app. You can then choose to subscribe to that community if you wish, to get updates and notifications of when posts are put up in that community. For example, in the gaming community, you would be notified when creators post a video, start a stream, or make an interactive post (such as a poll, or a question, or even just a picture) for subscribers to comment on. The purpose of these communities is to give people who are interested in the same things, in this case video games, a place to go where they can share their content, watch others content, and talk with others in the comment sections of videos, streams, or posts. People can use this community to simply just entertain viewers, educate them, be interactive with them, and much much more.
A digital public is simply just an online version of a public sphere. So what is a public sphere? Well Jurgen Habermas is the man credited with basically coming up with the general idea of what public spheres are:
“Habermas’s concept of the public sphere thus described a space of institutions and practices between the private interests of everyday life in civil society” — Douglas Kellner
Since then there have been different interpretations of what the public sphere is, as times have changed and new technologies have come about, but the general idea has pretty much stayed the same. Digital publics are a new type of public sphere, one that has completely redefined how we look at public spheres because now, public spheres can include people from anywhere on earth. So how I would define a digital public, is a group of people who have similar interests and/or ideas who come together online and share those interests/ideas with others from all around the world.
So, why is the Youtube Gaming Community a digital public? The Youtube Gaming Community is a digital public because it is free space open to the public for sharing and discussing their opinions, content, ideas, etc.. The Youtube Gaming Community is a digital public because it allows for equal opportunities for anyone to communicate their ideas, their opinions, and their content. People are also given opportunities to showcase their content and grow their reach by making it to the front page of the community if a video, stream, or post that they make is popular among their individual community. The Youtube Gaming Community is a digital public because it has a general topic and brings people who are interested in that general topic together. It does this by giving people a place to entertain themselves, learn, find new things, open up to new ideas, and meet new people.
The Youtube Gaming Community meets all of the requirements for being a digital public, and they are continuously trying to come up with ways for users to share, as well as making it easier for them to share. For example, they came out with an app dedicated to the Youtube Gaming Community that made sharing and consuming content for gamers easier than ever before. Another thing that the Youtube Gaming Community could and should do, is create an instagram page. This would be an amazing opportunity as they could use this platform to showcase smaller creators who are bringing exciting content or ideas to the community to show people what else is in the Youtube Gaming community that they might be interested and are missing because the creator has a smaller reach. This in turn helps those creators with a smaller reach grow.