YouTube Playlist Auto-Ethnography

I use YouTube a lot [0]. Other social media have come and gone from my life over time [1], but I have continually used the platform daily since elementary school. From music to gameplay to lectures to video essays (bleh) to livestreams (more realistically twitch vods) to denpa vlogs to whatever else, I have spent a staggering amount of time on the platform. However, among all the things I have done on the platform over the years [2], nothing is more curious or demanding of analysis than the practice I have of creating playlists for people.

For a little background context: I have a lot of playlists on YouTube. For the longest time the primary ones that I used and created were !Music, .Music? and !Philos (although Watch Later is certainly my most used if you count that as a "playlist"). The special characters at the start just ensure that they remain at the top of my playlists when sorting alphabetically, because I save a lot of playlists created by others. These are mostly other people's music playlists or lecture series I want to go through. !Music is my main repository for music (I used to use my liked videos as a proxy but it was filling up too quickly and also had non-music videos that I actually just liked. .Music? is music that I wanted to listen to but hadn't yet and !Philos is just lectures or any more academic style content about philosophy, politics, sociology, literature, etc. I have since reached the max length of these playlists (5,000 videos) and have begun to iterate. I'm currently on .Music?4 and !Philos2, and decided to keep !Music as the name of my active music playlist and rename the old one to !Music(2016-2022).

Which brings me to the point of this post: creating dedicated playlists for specific people in my life. This practice started with a girl I began dating in high school, who I'll call G. I believe it was mainly motivated by dissatisfaction with the approach I had been using to share videos with her through text. Many of the things I wanted to share didn't seem significant enough to warrant that level of attention and I didn't even necessarily want to discuss it or anything, I just wanted her to have it as an option to look at. Furthermore, it's likely that I would be sending it at an inconvenient time or something else would come up and the video would be lost is a sea of further messages. So instead I made a playlist and had her save it to her account so she could access it at her leisure.

I included a wide variety of things in G's playlist: basically any YouTube content [3] I thought it would be interesting to her or that reminded me of her when I was watching. The majority of it ended up being music, but you couldn't really listen to it like a typical music playlist because there was a bunch of other trash thrown in as well. When she would talk to me about a specific video I put there or when we listened to a song together I would remove it from the playlist so she wouldn't be shown it any more [4].

I have a soft spot for these completely mangled playlist styles. It's this radically anti-utilitarian mess and something about that is just quite endearing to me. It was a really difficult decision for me to abandon using liked videos as my music playlist, and even the replacement of one massive undifferentiated playlist is not terribly convenient for most people's use-cases from what I can gather. For instance they might have specific driving playlists or segregated playlists based on genre or mood. I think this tendency in my approach makes the activity of creating separate playlists for people stand out more to me as an interesting phenomenon.

By the time I got to college this practice spread to my family. I believe the next person was my dad, who I would send mostly politics related videos so we could have conversations about them. He's probably the person that uses their playlist the most out of everyone I have made one for. He'll check it every now and then and talk to me about the things he watches, so in terms of the original goals this playlist is the best at fulfilling its function. Currently sitting at 347 videos, 222 views [5].

Next was my brother, and the videos were mainly just a confused mish mash of different things. Some politics, some memes, some music. I really kind of struggle with this one. I have a lot of things I want to show him because we do have a pretty good relationship, but I actually don't think we have very much at all in common so he doesn't really like the things I suggest. I don't blame him in any way because after all I'm the person including things there that are not in his interest anyway. 429 videos, 250 views.

Last of my family was my mom, and at this point it became very apparent that my construction of playlists had taken on a life of its own. What had started out as a specific problem solving technique had morphed over time. You see, my mom is not very tech savvy at all and can't navigate to the playlist herself and it's not like she uses YouTube independently for leisure anyways. So this playlist is more or less entirely for what I am getting out of it. Nearly all of the videos were education related because she is a teacher and I thought of her while listening to a lecture or something. Functionally it's useful as an organizational thing as a repository for certain education related videos and for me to remind myself of certain things I found interesting enough to be worth 'sharing'. 80 videos, 24 views.

It's at this point when things begin to get really interesting, at least in my opinion. The point of radical departure I am referring to, of course, is my breakup with G. To be more accurate, I got dumped lol. This was a colossal event that foundationally changed an incredible amount in my life.

In the period immediately after the breakup, I was in an emotionally weird spot. I was using twitter as a diary so I'll sample a few of the things I said at the time.

Interesting to note that I didn't document anything for the next nine days.

Suffice to say I was struggling just a bit. At this time the playlist I made for her received a lot of attention from me. Useful for reflecting about things and bringing to surface a lot of emotions. I quickly removed all of the remaining non-music entries and just listened to it as a music playlist, but wanted to leave everything in pristine condition otherwise. It was a really important place for me to return to and feel a lot of different things. At some point I renamed the playlist from "*[G's Name]" to just "*", probably because it was hard to see her name (lol, I know, cringe) [6]. Over time I loosened it up a bit the restrictions and began adding some music that I had previously removed from the playlist or some tracks that were never on it but were significant or memorable during our time together. Eventually this loosened even further into adding novel music I had just come across that made me think of her, which is how it stands now. The playlist has 326 videos and 1,179 views, which I'm nearly certain most of the views have come from me post-breakup. I still add songs to this day actually and revisit it every so often. Over time my emotional relationship to it has became a lot more tame, but it is still deeply important to me and the tracks remain poignant and nostalgic.

But the playlists I created didn't stop after that point. In 2022 I met a person who I'll call J that I had a fairly intense relationship with [7]. We spent a lot of time texting or calling on discord (over 50k messages lol), playing games together, and fae even traveled from a state away to spend 10 days with me. The playlist was mostly music, but because we were relatively new to meeting each other and at this point I had accumulated a big personal music playlist, I wanted to give something like a representative sampling of my music history interests mixed in with the more contemporary recommendations or songs that made me think of faer. It's worth noting that this relationship had a significant amount of emotional and physical intimacy [8] since that might speak to what type of relationship I might feel compelled to make a playlist for, though I'll get into that more in a bit. 183 videos, 102 views.

The next (and latest) person I made a playlist for is someone I'll call K. It's difficult to know where to start with K. We had a brief period of time where we spent an intense amount of time with one another and I don't think I have related more to anyone else in my entire life [9]. Indescribable sense of peace and security, a deep admiration for her intellect and personality, potentially envious [10] of her for a variety of physical features, intellectual abilities, and character traits. Even when we had not spoken for a rather long period of time I still thought of her quite often. One of the most memorable people from my college experience and some of the most fulfilling experiences I have ever had. It's also worth noting that at points I considered the possibility that I was emotionally or romantically or physically attracted her, but this is confusing because I admired her a lot independently on those grounds so it's difficult to disagregate (and also a lot of those things are difficult to recognize for me, specifically romance as I am still unconvinced it's a coherent concept). K's playlist was pretty similar to J's in scope. In the description I wrote the following:

This was mostly included as a justification for sharing the playlist at all since our relationship was more oriented around lengthy one-on-one conversations and this was a pretty weird thing to do. I'm not sure if she has looked at it even once, and I'm almost certain she hasn't listened to anything on it, and I was aware of that going in. 166 videos, 170 views. At this point making playlists had become completely inverted from it's original pragmatic aim of sharing something with a person I care about into a way for me to externalize my feelings and creative energy around thinking about a person.

But before I truly begin the main analysis section, I'm going to need a detour to establish some things: mainly relating to the type of relationship I do this for. I tend to not have a high number of friends at any given time. I don't know if this is a holdover from G to some extent, but I basically only have one main friend at a time that I turn to with everything I want to share things with socially. Something interesting happened to me? I have some feelings I need to work out? The relatively rare case when I feel lonely and want to hang out with someone? I will usually have one person for this at a time, or at least historically have since G. This might sound exhausting on their end but I'm often not too social so it's possible I'm just like an average friend load for them I'm not too sure. The whole "primary friends" thing isn't intentional by any means and it feels weird even giving a label; it just happens to be a pattern I reoccurently fall into I suppose. In any case all of the people I have mentioned making playlists so far have been my primary friend during one period of time or another. G from high school to early 2021, J during early-mid 2022, K late 2022.

You can see there's a gap there during post-G/pre-J era. I actually did have a primary friend during this time, who I'll call R. The absence of her playlist is extremely interesting to me, but in order to talk about that I'll need to explain what kind of relationship we had at the time. Our relationship was pretty interesting. We met through one of my old Overwatch teammates (like first team ever old) in late 2021 (I spent a long time alone just kinda figuring stuff out). I think it's interesting because we actually didn't have much overlap at all in terms of specific activities or hobbies that we would do together and are 3-4 years apart in age. It seems like an odd basis for a friendship but actually we just had really great personal in-depth convesations and it was very comforting companionship. Through our interactions I processed a lot of emotions and during that time period I began emotionally maturing a lot. Without a doubt one of the most significant relationships I've had in my life. Extremely important for my emotional development, confidence, and orientation in the world. Despite the depth of the relationship, R was actually extremely approachable, I felt extremely at ease with her, and we had very low pressure interactions [11]. She was always incredibly available, kind, and supportive to me and it always felt like I was really being listened to.

So even though this person was extremely important to me, I did not end up feeling compelled to make them a playlist. I can think of several reasons for this. Firstly, this could have simply been due to the fact that it hadn't really become an established practice for me yet. I'm a little fuzzy on the exact timeline for when I made my family playlists, but even if I had already created theirs it's not clear that it was something that was really on my radar as an option. More direct features of our relationship also probably contribute as well. For instance, we did not have a massive overlap in specific interests, so there wasn't much I felt the desire to share from my hobbies and we didn't talk philosophy or politics at all basically so sending lectures wasn't going to happen. Also, as I mentioned she was very approachable and available and I could just send whatever videos I had in mind anyway. She would respond very promptly so there was no issue of the videos getting buried in messages.

However it's possible that's all potentially just cope, as it's possible the real difference was that I wasn't romantically interested in her. As I mentioned previously I have a hard time understanding that word and I'm pretty wary using it, but maybe the real answer to the definition is just "whatever the vibes are that compel you to make a YouTube playlist of songs". I mean it wouldn't be completely incoherent right, like you're thinking about the person a lot and it's associated with a lot of emotions? And music can express those emotions and communicate in ways other things can't? I'm not sure. In any case it's an extremely small sample size to be drawing any terribly drastic conclusions. It is interesting however that the desire for creation is always rather surprising and catches me off guard. In many ways I think it's similar to these blog posts, where I have a lot of festering ideas and emotions and then they all come outpouring at once.

It's clear the purpose for making playlists is not primarily about them appreciating what I share, and in some ways directly having an interaction or conversation about what I had shared would spoil it for me. I want to have this minimal act of creation that allows me to externalize my feelings about a person without requiring direct social interaction. Once this creation exists it serves a variety of distinct but highly related functions: a repository for videos and music that I associate with a significant person in my life, allows me to reaffirm myself and the things I enjoy, recontextualizes existing aesthetic associations (for instance, I have very different emotional engagement with the same song that is placed in *G, *J, and *K), and offers a space for me to think about a significant person in my life and reflect on our relationship.

I have another function in mind that is a bit difficult to describe but I'll do my best. Knowing in the back of my mind that I have such a playlist gives rise to the possibility of recontextualizing any YouTube video I see. Even having the option available makes for an entirely differently modality of engagement. I think that this helps to make the person remain in my thoughts and sometimes that's really comforting. Often I notice that just those minimal thoughts alone are enough to keep me from ever feeling lonely. Like I don't need friends actively, I just need the shadow of old friends. I don't think that's entirely true, but it does at least contribute to the delay in my socializing clock sometimes. Other times certainly though it causes me to miss the person in question, but rarely is it something that causes me to actively want to work towards resolving or reconnecting with the person. Moreso it allows me to feel some sadness and melancholy in the context of a relationship gone by, which I also think is healthy and important.

Anyway, that's about it. I thought it would be worthwhile to note one of the odd practices I engage in and discuss some of the reasons I might attribute to why I do it. It's one of those fascinating things to me that I would love to approach from an anthropological perspective but of course it's actually extremely difficult if not impossible to get outside myself in the right way to reflect on my behavior in that way. Nonetheless, hopefully this serves as a nice historical snapshot of what I was thinking during this time [12].

Edit: 4/22/2023

nvm lol I just made a playlist for M, a new friend who I have no romantic feelings for. Just a thing I do with no easily generalizable meaning I suppose. The specific meaning will be determined by the contextual nature of the relationship.

Edit: 4/24/2023

Another aspect that I neglected to focus my attention on was the fact that these playlists are all made for new friends, at least as far as the more recent playlists are concerned. I think this is significant because it is precisely at this time when I'm likely to be concerned about how I present myself or appear to another person. It's helpful for me to have a resource of things that I affirm and value; YouTube videos on a wide range of topics allow me to do that. This is especially important because I think I have a rather poor grasp on my identity in general [13] and often feel pointing at external resources can be beneficial for both others to get a sense for my interests but more crucially for me to understand how I could present myself. This theory would also explain the habit I have of overlapping a lot of inclusions on new friends' playlists. Though rather than looking for one clean explanatory function, this identity presentation modality is probably best acknowledged as one among many motivations and purposes.