YouTube

Our current investigation of youth video projects (YVPs) has been primarily based on agency-produced videos, i.e. video work by youth that is funded, organized and often structured by social welfare, activist, artistic and/or educational institutions. The videos produced under these circumstances, more often than not, fall into the categories Kim (2007) describes in her thesis on YVPs: the festival model, the artist-in-residency model, the process-focussed model, or the message-focussed model (please see the Kim (2007) post for a more thorough explanation of these models). However, there is another important mode of youth video that often works from outside agency spaces--the “vlog.”

The term vlog is an amalgam of video and “blog” (blog is, in turn, an mash-up of “web log”). Therefore, one might imagine that a vlog is simply the addition of visual, auditory and temporal dimensions to the all-familiar blog. Blogs are primarily used as forums for public diaries, independent journalism or social commentary. Video blogs often present similar content. A boom, of sorts, in vlogging occurred in 2005, with the establishment of the Yahoo! Videoblogging Group and the creation of YouTube (Wikipedia, 2009). YouTube is unique compared to most personal, journalistic or social commentary vlogs, in that its overall content is quite diverse and unruly. YouTube media range from “pirated” television and music videos, to social and journalistic commentary, to community building/support groups, to silly, one-off performances of would-be comedians and daredevils. In this way, YouTube seems to offer a space of video production that is outside even the minimal formality of a typical vlog. For these reasons, I believe that YouTube offers one of the most unstructured forums for youth video production and consumption. It would, therefore, be a worthwhile endeavour to compare the ways that youth characterize themselves through video on YouTube to the ways that they self-represent within the often rigid and constricting mandates of agency YVPs.

This is not to say that YouTube provides a space of production that is without its own discursive limits and cultural norms. YouTube videos are not, necessarily, more “authentic” representations of young people. However, the norms and limits on YouTube seem to be established, for the most part, by youth themselves (although there is no shortage of community guidelines and terms of use to govern site content). There is also such a broad community on the site that it is relatively easy to navigate oneself into spaces that allow for different forms of expression, or to create one’s own (potentially “invisible”) space. Lange (2007) investigates these spaces of production in her ethnographic analysis of social networks on YouTube. She uses interviews with YouTube users and analyses of videos and user comments to outline structural models that have developed around a certain kind of YouTube video—the social networking video. For Lange, there are two major models for social network videos on YouTube: publicly private and privately public.

In publicly private videos, users “share private experiences...but do so in a ‘public way,’ by revealing personal identity information” (Lange, 2007, pg. 9). Privately public, on the other hand, is an attempt to connect with a broad audience through video “while being relatively private with regard to sharing identity information” (Lange, 2007, pg. 11). This can be accomplished by wearing masks or using alternate identities. Lange’s dichotomy of public vs. private could be an interesting framework to use in our exploration of youth video. What is allowed to be public information in an agency-sponsored YVP? What is kept private? How do the limits and norms around the public and the private differ between YVPs and YouTube vlogs? This may simply be another way of comparing the discursive practices of different forms of video-making.

An interesting example of the publicly private on YouTube is described in a 2007 article from The Advocate entitled Transtube. Transitioning youth have been found using the site to document their experience and educate and support others going through the various stages of a gender transformation. Tips are provided on hair removal, surgery, restroom etiquette and hormone therapy (Kennedy, 2007). Some trans youth have described YouTube as high-quality source of support and advice, making them feel “more confident and their worlds [feel] less frightening” (Kennedy, 2007, p. 19). “High quality” here refers more to useful information and social capital than to sophisticated production. These videos, like many “social networking” videos on YouTube, are often grainy, unedited and shot in informal locations, such as a messy bedroom. This lo-fi aesthetic is significantly different from many agency YVPs I have seen, which are often edited professionally or semi-professionally, shot in more formal, public spaces and boasting elaborate soundtracks and titling. Lange (2007) states that this level of technical sophistication is not a requirement for YouTube videos:

critics fail to understand that video quality is not necessarily the determining factor in terms of how videos affect social networks. Rather, creating and circulating video affectively enacts social relationships between those who make and those who view videos (p. 8).

Is this technical/aesthetic divide one of the principle differences between agency YVPs and vlog media? If agencies encourage videos that emphasize politics and productivity while YouTube spawns work that is primarily social, can we relate these functional differences to material/aesthetic differences? Does hi-fi = political/productive and lo-fi = social? I believe that this potential dichotomy is an important one when looking at youth video. The embracing of the grainy, informal aesthetic on YouTube may be one way that youth are subverting Fleetwood’s (2005) cycle of representation.