A Book Club for the 21st Century: An Ethnographic Exploration of BookTube

This dissertation explores how adolescents engage with literacy practices through participation in BookTube. Though technology use is often positioned at odds with reading traditional print books (Du, 2009), BookTube is a growing community of readers on YouTube who are engaging with reading through participation in social media and building digital identities as readers. The data collected during this four-month virtual ethnographic (Hine, 2000) study included almost 400 YouTube videos from 30 BookTube channels created by adolescents (13-18), nine hours of interviews with three focal participants, and a community survey. The first article considers how adolescents build identities as readers through BookTube and defines the features of the digital space. The study found that BookTube can be understood as a Discourse (Gee, 1999/2011) where BookTubers are performing situated identities through participation in creating videos for the space. The Discourse of BookTube is marked by specific props, settings, vocabulary, and video genres that BookTubers employ to be recognized as performing their identities as readers. These findings suggest implications for creating communities of readers in classrooms through building social interaction between readers, and facilitating practices such as goal setting and reading choice in independent reading to help student build identities as readers. The second article explores how young people engaged in literacy practices through BookTube and how they describe their participation in the space. Using new literacies theory (Lankshear & Knobel, 2011) and data from focal participant interviews, I found that BookTubers developed literacy skills by both learning to use new technology tools to create their videos and by engaging with the new “ethos stuff” of participation, collaboration, and distributed knowledge. This study suggests that teenagers used YouTube as a site for learning digital video production skills, making friends, and sharing book recommendations. Therefore, BookTube represents an intersection of traditional and new literacies, both developed through an authentic context. The third article illustrates how adolescents’ literacy practices are commodified through their participation in BookTube. The study found that young people are engaging in self-branding practices, as both “influencers” and “microcelebrities,” even though they may not necessarily be earning money from their channels. It is hoped that this study will inform educators of the values and practices underlying participation in heavily commodified new media spaces such as YouTube.Doctor of Philosoph