Anna Wolters*, maastricht university, maastricht, Netherlands Track: Research Presentation Topic: The nature and dynamics of social networks in health Presentation Type: Oral presentation Submission Type: Single Presentation Building: MECC Room: 0.9 Athens Date: 2010-11-29 04:45 PM – 06:15 PM Last modified: 2010-10-31

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Background: Smoking has lost its former presence in off-line society, yet about a third of the Western population is a daily user of tobacco. Has smoking gone digital? The internet is still a largely unregulated universe when it comes to health norms. Though people search for health information on the net, and numerous computer-mediated communities (CMC’s) or social networks are built for coping with disease, the medium also propagates behaviour that is generally considered unhealthy, notably smoking. YouTube is the website par excellence when it comes to showing what people do. Subscribers post high and low quality videos of themselves or of other smokers to the larger community. While web-assisted tobacco interventions are proposed as a support tool for smoking cessation, an open access site like YouTube provides the architecture for hard core smokers to unite and to communicate.
Objective: Create a fuller understanding of digital health behaviour by analyzing the peculiar use that (adolescent) consumers make of YouTube with regard to smoking. Does the internet generate new attitudes? YouTube may be a kind of cultural mirror, reflecting smoking as a non-politically correct habit, dealing with the tobacco controversy in comparable ways as broader society does. It may also offer ways for smokers to defend or to proclaim their behaviour. If the latter is the case, then are these expressions purely individual, or is it possible to talk of a YouTube community of smokers?
Methods: A qualitative analysis of a corpus of 110 YouTube videos and their respective comments, focusing on the interaction between users. Content (image, words, music), titles, tags, number of views and comments are coded and studied in-depth. From the sum of textual and visual comments and replies of each video, dominant topics are extracted. The separate results are mutually compared and interpreted. In this process, the contours of sub-communities becomes visible. Finally, exterior sources are used to check or to contrast the findings. Thus, the empirical, ethnographical research is embedded in CMC and networking literature.
Results: Patterns in the digital appreciation of the cigarette point at the existence of groups and sub-communities of smokers. Three themes recur: smoking as fetish, rebellious smoking, and smoking education. All three provide surprising insights into the meaning and the use of the cigarette for young men and women.
Conclusion: While non-smoking is becoming the social norm in off-line society, YouTube users gather around the controversial cigarette. Though health aspects of smoking are not ignored in the videos or the comments, they are superseded by the cigarette as a symbol of eroticism and antagonism. The case studies demonstrate that YouTube is not merely a mirror of the society from which the smokers are relegated. For certain smokers, YouTube offers the opportunity to proudly present themselves as such, to find company and support, and to share a playful approach of smoking.