You Tube is a place where digital natives can practice self-expression while working on their identities through brand development. The articles we have read this week discuss how these ideas interplay with one another. The development of ones identity at times through branding is done through interaction with viewers that provide feedback.
Performances on You Tube videos are validated by the number of views and comments the videos receive, which is in turn crucially significant to self-branding. (Branding the Post-Feminist Self: Girls' Video Production and YouTube p. 288)
I see problems arising with the constant necessary validation of self-identity as explored particularly by the young. Identity by the young is basically the same in both physical and online spaces. Adolescents more than any other time in their lives explore different aspects of identity and shifts occur regularly. The comments, and views that come via YouTube are a recognition of one's self. Being seen and believed makes ones identity real; real for the individual creating the content and real for the viewer receiving the content.
This reminded me of a post I saw on YouTube last year. It received many hits and touched many of those who saw it. It was a post of a boy discussing the effects of bullying for him personally. He reached many people who saw his video. A while later, he posted a video of him and a friend smiling, goofing and speaking of his popularity with others. (This post was later taken down). This led many to call into question the validity of this post.
This controversy was over the believability of ones identity. And as digital natives seem to share identity between physical and online spaces easily, the 'proof' required to show a believable shift may not always come through in online settings. This missing component could be damaging to ones identity as it relies on others recognition.
I remember when YouTube started and there were hundreds of people beginning to realize the profitability and notoriety of creating a popular persona and pretending to be real. Seems if someone can get us to "look," the advertisers are not far behind.
ReplyDeleteThis does beg the question: are we creating a culture of youth who are in need of constant validation? I mean, there has always been the "cry for attention" from kids of a certain age. However, is it getting worse? And then, as noted, we are left with the question of what to believe (the focus of my post). Ah, the joys of the digital age...
ReplyDeleteI think it is getting worse. Parents seem to not punish their children as much or are too afraid to because they will be judged and/or in trouble with the law. This makes kids feel like they call the shots and gives them delusions of grandeur as well as a sense of entitlement. Things should just be handed to them and they don't want to get their hands dirty when they get into the real world where they need to contribute something of real substance.
ReplyDeleteTake a good look at the Chicago Teacher's Strike.
ReplyDeleteOne of the complaints is that parents there have to scramble to find daycare for their children, or suck up the loss of household revenue that they must take in having one of them not be at work to properly supervise their child. They see schools as daycare as much, if not more than, they do education facilities.
This is a symptom of a larger problem, which is the degradation of the 40 Hour Week/8 Hour Day and the rise to de facto requirement of a Two Income Household, because these two long-running trends destabilize American life by removing the necessary security that citizens in a republic must have to fully engage in civic life (and thus competently guard their own interests).
So you have a working adult population that's run ragged, vulnerable to employer exploitation, lacking in useful alternatives, and coming home dead-dog tired and drained of energy. The last thing they want to do is deal with anything complex or tedious, and kids are both.
The "special snowflake" problem, therefore, is not just the willful delusion of status-seeking parents. Their everyday reality encourages this aberrant thinking by making them vulnerable to demagoguery (e.g. Limbaugh) that gives them an easy and simple answer.
This is why talk radio and T.V. remain very popular, especially with the prime demographics that now have young kids; "we know you're pain, so we'll help you by doing the heavy thinking for you"- this is one of the warning signs for a cult, by the way.
It's rather interesting to compare atttitudes from pre and post-Baby Boom generations; my folks were immediate pre-Boom, and they handle my sister and I as their predecessors did- no special snowflake stuff for me. The parents of many of my peers, however, were Boomers and in the 1980s I saw a lot of the early versions of these trends manifest. The worsening of these trends correlates with--but, of course, is not caused by--the erosion of the working class in the last generation. There seems to be the idea that their kids must be special, or they did all that hustling for nothing. It's the Sunk Cost Fallacy writ large.