Joe is interested in researching fitness YouTube communities focused on weight lifting, body building, and power lifting. He plans to watch popular channels and branch out to smaller ones, analyzing how each channel communicates with viewers and other YouTubers, the unique goals of each, and differing levels of expertise. His research questions focus on common goals, uniqueness, popularity factors, common lexicon, and communication across the community.

1. To: Rebecca Agosta
From: Joe Vergato
Date: October 22, 2014
Subject of Inquiry: Fitness YouTube Community
Initial Inquiry Idea:
YouTube is an ever growing website online in which people can communicate using videos.
There are videos on anything you could ever think about. This means that anyone can start
watching videos on something that they are interested in. If you spend enough time on YouTube
you notice that there are “channels”. These channels are people who create accounts to make
videos about a certain topic. What is great about having a channel dedicated to a certain topic is
that there are many other people that also have a channel dedicated to this topic. Now you have a
discourse community.
I am personally interested fitness YouTube communit ies. These fitness communities I am
interested in focus on lifting weights and specializing in either body building or power lifting. I
already know that there is a huge fitness community on YouTube and I am curios to find out
more about what makes each channel unique. I want to find out what the common goals are for
all the channels and what makes each channel different. I also want to explore how each
YouTube channel communicates with the people who view their channel and how
communication between other YouTube channels is done. After researching this I hope to find
out the different levels of expertise, the ways of interacting (ie comments on videos), the lexis
used (YouTube lexis and weight lifting lexis), and the unique goals of each channel. I am very
excited to research this topic because when I was in high school I was interested in lifting
weights and would sometimes go to YouTube for advice and help.
Methods:
To begin this assignment I am going to start watching the popular fitness channels I already
know about and then branch off from those to find the smaller channels. I will watch both body
building channels and power lifting channels. I can also research the people running the channels
online because they often have websites describing themselves and giving free advice. I will be
observing this community on my computer as everything is online on YouTube and various
websites.
Questions:
1. What are the overall common goals of the YouTube fitness community?
2. How is each channel unique from all the others?
3. What makes one channel more popular than another?
4. What lexis are commonly used for all channels?
5. How do the people running the channel communicate with other YouTubers/fans?
6. Are there differing levels of expertise from channel to channel?