YouTube and Facebook: Online Video "Friends" Social Networking

This paper examines the links to YouTube from the Facebook “walls” of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John McCain over two years prior to the 2008 U.S. Presidential election. User-generated linkage patterns show how participants in these politically-related social networking dialogues used online video to make their points. We show a strong integration of the Web 2.0 and new media technologies of social networking and online video. We argue that political discussion in social networking environments can no longer be viewed as primarily textual, and that neither Facebook nor YouTube can be viewed as isolated information environments. Their interlinkage pattern, combined with links to other sites, provides a multidimensional communication environment which participants must navigate in order to gain a full understanding of the issues. Civic life is becoming more sociotechnical, and will therefore involve engagements with ideas as they are constructed by others out of disparate information sources and their interlinkages.