La fluidité des espaces communicationnels : partager des vidéos en ligne dans la vie quotidienne

The Internet evolves continually with society and the development of new technologies, but its uses remain centered on the communicative principle of connecting with others and sharing ideas, stories and information. Understanding the communication modes of the Internet offers a sizable challenge to researchers. Despite a rich literature on Internet usages, few studies offer in-depth analysis of the habits of ordinary users. This study specifically addresses the question of online content sharing, as a practice that enables reflection on users' relationships with technologies. Drawing inspiration from the work of Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau, this dissertation mobilizes the notion of daily life (the quotidien), a concept that highlights the processes through which people make sense of their lives. In order to best apprehend daily experience that is mobile, fluid and multiple, I draw on spatial metaphors from science and technology studies. With their sensitivity to both social and material characteristics, fluid object and fire space concepts are well-suited for studying video-sharing practices that are highly mutable and adaptable. Since I emphasize subjective experiences, the research design involved a qualitative methodology. I met with ten participants three times each. During these meetings, they described their video sharing practices and told stories around using and sharing videos. Building on recurrent themes that emerge from transcriptions of various conversations, in the tradition of grounded theory, the first part of the analysis provides a rich description of everyday life and video sharing. In particular, I discuss how people regulate their sharing behavior on social networking sites, how they use video to maintaining their social relationships and how sharing videos complements their conversations. The second part of the analysis focuses on the complexity of everyday life, and draws attention to how one context flows almost imperceptibly into another, and how online and offline worlds intersect. Fluidity offers a metaphor to support the complex, dynamic and flexible aspects of ordinary users’ video sharing practices in a continually changing space. This qualitative approach produces a picture of the human experience that is rich and detailed, and allows us to highlight the different contexts in which the participants navigate their daily lives. It is in these often unremarkable contexts that human activities are constantly constructed and transformed, creating opportunities for new ways of doing and thinking.  The dissertation engages in an interdisciplinary dialogue between communication (particularly Internet Studies) and science and technology studies (STS) in order to offer new perspectives for the analysis of uses of the social Web. It also makes an original contribution by integrating theoretical approaches to daily practices with grounded theory. The conceptual foundations and methodological approach developed here provide a useful guide for other researchers interested in pursuing the understanding of everyday practices involving the Internet, especially when these involve visual, emotional and relational elements.

Keyphrases: Internet, STS, conversation, grounded theory, fluid object, everyday life, sharing, video