Kids on YouTube

Technical Identities and Digital Literacies

Patricia G Lange

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315425719
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

The mall is so old school—these days kids are hanging out on YouTube, and depending on whom you ask, they're either forging the digital frontier or frittering away their childhoods in anti-intellectual solipsism. Kids on YouTube cuts through the hype, going behind the scenes to understand kids' everyday engagement with new media. Debunking the stereotype of the self-taught computer whiz, new media scholar and filmmaker Patricia G. Lange describes the collaborative social networks kids use to negotiate identity and develop digital literacy on the 'Tube. Her long-term ethnographic studies also cover peer-based and family-driven video-making dynamics, girl geeks, civic engagement, and representational ethics. This book makes key contributions to new media studies, communication, science and technology studies, digital anthropology, and informal education.

8CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Ways with Video

Every day, kids are sharing their lives through video. The most popular video-sharing site is YouTube, which streams more than 4 billion videos daily (Oreskovic 2012; PR Newswire 2013). With 1 billion users visiting every month, more than 100 hours of video are uploaded to the site every minute (Warman 2013). As kids increasingly engage in this vastly popular activity, society is debating the question, Are kids actually learning anything by making so many videos?

YouTube's catalogue is so vast that it can seem like a different phenomenon depending on how one uses it (Lange 2008a). Most people think of YouTube as simply a repository of disturbing or funny videos of things like skate boarding dogs. Indeed, the site's earliest beginnings stemmed from its founders' desire to share videos of interest to them. At that time, casually sharing videos online was difficult given videos' high bandwidth. The company was founded in February 2005 by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jared Karim, who met when working at PayPal, an online payment service (Hopkins 2006). The site's first test video had the look and feel of a grassroots effort. Entitled Me at the zoo, the 20-second video depicted Karim in front of an elephant exhibit simply commenting on the animals' trunks (Pham 2010). In its initial years, the site garnered interest in part because of the wide variety of videos it displayed, including both amateur and professional fare, and in part because it allowed participants to interact and comment on videos. Numerous thriving sub-communities formed, including one that was oriented around connecting with other YouTubers who enjoyed making more communicative videos.

After YouTube was acquired by Google for 1.7 billion in 2006 (Hopkins 2006), ongoing desires for profitability lead to increased use of advertising mechanisms and deals with media companies to show more videos made by professionals. I observed that the look and feel of the site changed frequently, 9and eventually morphed from being a more social media platform with links to friends and commentary, to emphasize more commercial fare and individualized consumption of the professional media that the corporate entity of YouTube chose to feature.

The site's vast catalogue makes it a kind of Rorschach mirror that reflects each viewer's own desires, fantasies, and fears. Typically when I tell someone I am researching YouTube, they describe the particular video or genre that they find most amusing or frightening. A parent might ask if I have seen videos made by cyberbullies; a college student might ask if I've seen the latest video of a popular 20-something celebrity who had just hit the big time. Politicians are also part of the action; many have seen their campaigns derailed or their issues boosted by participating on YouTube, thus underscoring its importance to the civic landscape (Schwab 2008). Others pointed out the vast array of tutorials YouTube offers on everything from making cakes to tackling a complicated piano piece. Many people have observed, “You can learn anything on YouTube.”

YouTube is much more than a place to go and see viral videos. Although kids have fun simply watching YouTube, many choose to make their own videos. In so doing, they develop new media literacies that kids and scholars believe will help them communicate and participate more fully in an increasingly networked world. New digital communication media invite us to reconsider the skills, knowledge sets, and tools that future generations need to master to be able to participate fully as networked citizens and self-actualized individuals. While some parents and educators see what happens on YouTube as frivolity, in fact, kids are exhibiting an awareness that they must have the skills to use new technical tools in order to self-actualize and achieve visible personhood among heterogeneous, networked publics.

When young people express themselves through video and socialize with family and friends, they are building on a long tradition of media sharing in the United States. Having an online presence and sharing one's message through media are key aspects of being a socially connected young person. Sites such as YouTube enable children and families to broadcast their message in ways that yield both opportunities and complications for their person-hood, technical identities, and self-actualization. On the one hand, kids have exciting opportunities to learn digital skills by choosing preferred media and tackling personally exciting projects. They learn many technical and participatory media skills when they make and distribute videos online. Such activities are changing the definition of literacy. On the other hand, making videos presents participatory and ethical challenges, as people create and share media that may circulate in perpetuity to unpredictable publics. Knowing what to share is an important aspect of media literacy.

10Skeptics need only examine the crucial role that social media played in the U.S. presidential elections of 2008 and 2012 to appreciate the importance of online expression for achieving tangible success in one of the world's most visible seats of power (Knight 2012; Wortham 2012). Social media skills are becoming widely perceived as crucial for participating in everyday civic processes, discussing issues, and influencing voter outcomes. But such skills are not developed overnight. Media skills are built up through the micro-interactions that individuals have when creating personally interesting media, receiving feedback, and learning to craft the self and broadcast one's message.

In many ways, Shirley Brice Heath's (1983) classic work on people's “ways with words” serves as an important inspiration for this research. Years ago, Heath investigated how people learned to read, write, and communicate in everyday contexts at home and in school. She examined what kids read and how they learned to communicate during play, religious activities, and casually on the family's front porch. She explored in great detail the effects of community interaction patterns on the development of working-class kids' literacies. In some cases, home-based basic reading and writing practices did not prepare kids well for school, and what was learned in school was not always integrated back into family life. She found that language use was greatly influenced by the values and social roles that people engaged in with their families and communities. Such factors were crucial in “determining an individual's access to goods, services, and estimations of position and power in the community” (Heath 1983:11). Heath describes severe disconnects between the literacy practices at school and at home. The importance of language development outside of school depended a great deal on its perceived usefulness in everyday communication and socialization.

A new disconnect is now being observed with video—except the trajectory is going in the opposite direction. Instead of seeing people struggle to understand the everyday value of things taught in school, many young people are now developing important skills outside of the classroom, yet these skills are not yet consistently recognized as important in formal institutions. Although the situation varies cross-culturally and is changing, parents and educators do not always value social media and video. Conversely, many kids and teens are learning important digital skills outside of the classroom, a trend which fuels an unrealistic mythos that informal learning outside of classrooms is guaranteed and natural for all young people who are growing up with suites of digital technologies. Kids are assumed to be inherently fluent at using all media to the same degree. These trends yield popular binary discourses that either characterize youth as frittering their time away on sites like YouTube, or as natural-born technologists who learn nothing from peers, families, or teachers. Neither extreme is helpful for understanding media experiences.

11Although informal learning environments like YouTube enable exciting learning opportunities for people to make media together and gain crucial feedback, not everyone does it alone, and people's learning opportunities vary. This book enhances our understanding of media experiences by developing these central arguments:

• Despite the mythos that technically oriented kids are mostly self-taught, the meaning of that term varies greatly, and includes intensely social forms of learning when making media with friends and family.
• Many children and teens wish to project an identity of being technically savvy, and the dynamics of technical identity negotiations have a direct influence on how and what kids learn.
• Digital inequities persist, even when kids in the same peer group have access to people and tools.
• Asymmetries of ability remain entrenched because people have different mediated dispositions and interests with regard to digital tools.

In the future, people who lack crucial self-expression skills across media may find themselves at a disadvantage to those who are acquiring these skills, whether inside or outside of classrooms. Yet informal learning opportunities present challenges. This book describes successful informal learning interactions, while also investigating the circumstances under which people who have physical access to technical and social tools struggle to master digital media skills.

Interpersonal dynamics and self-perceptions of identity shape learning opportunities. Kids sometimes compete and jockey for status among their peers in techno-cultural and techno-social hierarchies. They vie to appear technically savvy and superior to their friends and family. This competition means that learning is not always straightforward, even among well-intentioned friends. Kids also have different commitments to media; some achieve mastery as advanced amateurs, and others are content to stay casual. While exciting opportunities exist to learn in environments like YouTube, people's learning opportunities are not isometric.

People's “ways with video” quietly shape their individual learning opportunities, especially with regard to their perception of constructing, maintaining, and negotiating a technologized identity. Discourses about “digital youth,” “digital generations,” “net generations,” and similar terms often orient toward kids who are growing up with an ever-increasing suite of digital tools (Ito et al. 2010; Palfrey and Gasser 2008; Prensky 2006; Tapscott 2009). Discourses about “digital youth” acknowledge and honor the abilities of young people as they develop the skills necessary to communicate through 12technology. This book shares with these prior works an excitement about how such tools and access to networked publics offer fascinating growth opportunities to youth.

At the same time, if terms such as “digital youth” are taken to an extreme and analyzed in homogenous terms, people may assume that all kids of a certain age are equally knowledgeable about and are willing to use all types of digital tools. Yet, studies show that kids engage with technologies in very different ways, ranging from the social to the intensely geeked-out (Ito et al. 2010). In addition, not all young people have the same access to technologized media. Scholars have observed “participation gaps” (Jenkins et al. 2006), which often exhibit familiar socio-cultural inequities based on sex, gender, ethnicity, and class. It is difficult to grapple with advanced new media, for example, if you cannot afford a reasonably fast and reliable Internet connection. As new media become available, basic technical and infrastructural needs commensurately increase. Public access points such as libraries and community centers may not provide adequate platforms for advanced media manipulation. Such gaps reveal that not all children in the same age cohort have equal access to new media ecologies.

Many policy makers and technology advocates argue that if only each child had a computer, gaps in technical literacy skills would be eradicated. Having a robust computer is a good first step, but subtle participatory gaps, such as competition for relative technical identity, also influence what is learned within informal learning environments. This book contributes to our understanding of these more subtle but equally important digital inequities.

Children in the same age cohort may have widely different mediated dispositions, or tendencies toward certain activities with regard to the type of media or devices they use, and the online milieu within which they feel most comfortable. Such differences in approach to technology have been observed elsewhere, including formal technology classes. Some kids have associated computer use with being a “geek” and thus eschewed intensive engagements with technology (Holloway and Valentine 2003). Sometimes kids exhibit different trajectories with regard to how they enter into digital spaces (Ito et al. 2010). While some kids have preferred to engage in online spaces through “friendship-driven” social media sites such as Facebook, others gravitate toward a more focused interest in developing “geeked out” skills in niche areas, including making YouTube videos. Although it is possible for children to transition from modest engagements to developing deep skill sets, such a pattern is not necessarily a blue print for all kids' informal, extracurricular engagement with digital technologies of communication and play. Youth who enjoy geeking out are still perceived by many other kids as existing “at the margins of teens' social worlds” (Ito et al. 2010:16).

13By attending closely to kids' perceptions of technology and its uses, this book contributes to the project of new media literacy studies, which acknowledges the ideological and socially constructed definitions of what a particular cultural group sees as “literacy”—including which sets of knowledge and skills are necessary to succeed (Hull and Schultz 2002; Ito et al. 2010; Jenkins et al. 2006; Mahiri 2004). Literacy discourses are normatively constructed and are often emotional. Discourses about media literacies are often infused with concerns by adults, parents, and educators who are anxious about new technologies, and largely see themselves as marginalized from kids' techno-cultural worlds. Although definitions in technical environments are moving targets, media literacy can be defined as “the ability to access, analyze, evaluate, and create messages in a variety of forms” (Aufderheide and Firestone 1993). Digital media literacy does not ignore prior forms of literacy such as reading and writing, but rather extends traditional definitions to include skills such as digital video production that are required to navigate new media environments (Buckingham 2003; Jenkins et al. 2006).

Despite the mythos in technical cultures that the best way to learn is to be “self-taught” through hands-on “tinkering,” in fact, technical learning has a profoundly social quality (Bakardjieva 2005:102). What is meant by cognitive forms of “learning” and identifying the precise moment of the acquisition of new information or skills is beyond the scope of the present work. What is of vital interest is understanding how and when kids perceive that they can experience actionable learning opportunities, and whether they feel they can capitalize on such opportunities in their everyday video-making efforts. A learning opportunity in media is any situation in which participants perceive a possibility to change the status of their technical knowledge, production capabilities, participatory abilities, or self-expressive skills. This book argues that perceptions of learning opportunities' effectiveness in peer-to-peer settings was deeply intertwined with how people perceived their technical identities in relation to other people. Sometimes the perceived asymmetry of technological knowledge among a group of video making peers was so high and time pressures so great to keep pace with video production schedules that video makers did not have the resources or energy to bring all of their friends up to speed. This kind of asymmetrical learning was not intentionally harmful or selfish, but emerged because people had different goals and dispositions with regard to how much time and energy they realistically wanted to spend on learning video skills.

If kids often learn by “observing and communicating with people engaged in the same interests and in the same struggles for status and recognition that they are,” then it is imperative to analyze informal social processes of using digital media (Ito et al. 2010:22). This book investigates new media literacy 14dynamics by ethnographically exploring the intersection between informal learning, technical identities, and lived experiences of video production and participation on YouTube. Central questions include: How do youth use video to express the self? How do they achieve a technical identity, and do these identity negotiations help them capitalize on learning opportunities to achieve digital media literacies? Under what circumstances do things go smoothly and when do complications ensue? What are the roots of these complications and how might ethnography reveal them?

The book draws on a two-year ethnographic study of U.S. kids and adults on YouTube that I conducted from 2006 to 2008. Because many young people generally referred to themselves as “kids” rather than “children” in ethnographic interviews, terms such as “kids” and “youth” will be used interchangeably throughout the book. The ethnography included interviews with 110 adults, including parents of young children, and 40 young people who participated on YouTube. Interviews were conducted with 22 kids, aged 9 to 17, and 18 young adults, aged 18 to 26. The study also draws on participant-observation methods, and analyses of artifacts such as videos and text comments to understand everyday video making practices. Online observations of interaction were collected as people discussed videos on the site through text and video comments. Observations were also recorded at in-person, YouTube meet-ups where people gathered to socialize, have fun, and make media with friends and family.

The ethnography also included a participatory component. I established my own video blogs called AnthroVlog (one on YouTube and another on a separate site off of YouTube) and posted one video per week to viscerally understand what it meant to display one's work-in-progress for the world to judge. The project is comparative in that I studied YouTubers, as well as early video bloggers who maintained websites off of YouTube. The videos posted to AnthroVlog on YouTube received a combined total of more than 1 million views. This level of viewership prompted a request from the site to apply for YouTube partner status, an invitation which I have so far declined to pursue. Additional details about the ethnographic approach are in the Appendix.

In mapping the ethnographic terrain, one inevitably grapples with the kind of videos and video makers that should be studied. Rather than choosing between pre-professionals and vernacular video making, the ethnography explored a diverse array of videos that will be referred to as personally expressive media. Many study participants were early adopters of YouTube. They strove to hone their craft and become media professionals. Many advanced amateurs also posted casual, everyday media of themselves and their friends hanging out. Conversely, several casual video makers saw their videos take off, and they began to monetize their work and change career plans. Such 15trends problematize strict delineations of videos and video makers as either professional or vernacular. As a result of the study's open-ended approach, the ethnography includes a diverse set of videos, from live-action versions of computer games to deeply felt video blogs about civic engagement to casual footage of teens having fun on a hike. While many of the youth in the study strove to prepare for a media career, others were more interested in connecting with people who shared similar interests.

The aim of the study was to investigate the interrelationship between video self-expression, learning opportunities, and technologized aspects of identity. To grapple with these issues, the ethnography draws on three main concepts: personally expressive media; performances of technical affiliation; and phenomenologies of the mediated moment. Studying people's interpretive experiences of specific mediated moments challenges the crude categorizations of “creator” and “viewer,” and opens a path to exploring how the creation of personally expressive media helped shape informal learning encounters.

Personally Expressive Media

In researching the subtle dynamics of informal learning, an ethnographer is faced with an important challenge. Should one study advanced amateurs and pre-professionals, or should one focus on everyday video making such as posting videos of a fun time at a coffee shop? Which category will yield the greatest insights for understanding how people build technical and participatory skills in informal learning environments? Any discussion about what is happening on YouTube must be considered within a larger context of past traditions of making media. Are things being posted to YouTube the same or different, for example, to what Chalfen (1987) called the “home mode” of photographs and video?

Studying YouTube means acknowledging and dealing with a complicated variety of videos. Such diversity problematizes prior categorizations that strictly delineate amateurs from professionals. Such binaries have been theoretically problematized in other areas of amateurism and media (Buckingham et al., 2007; Burgess and Green, 2009b; Moran, 2002; Stebbins, 1977; Toffler, 1980). For example, Stebbins (1977) argued that a syst...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: Ways with Video
• 2 Video-Mediated Friendships: Specialization and Relational Expertise
• 3 Girls Geeking Out on YouTube
• 4 Mediated Civic Engagement
• 5 Video-Mediated Lifestyles
• 6 Representational Ideologies
• 7 On Being Self-Taught
• 8 Conclusion
• References
• Index
• About the Author