Sonja Baumer: Self Production and Social Feedback Through Online Video-Sharing on YouTube
Filed at 7:03 pm on August 16, 2007 in Identity • 4 comments
Psychologist Sonja Baumer analyzes how YouTube video production and sharing helps young people gain better self-understanding.
“Fatalshade” is a YouTube screen name for a 19-year-old college student who comes from a rural area and works occasionally on her family’s farm. I stumbled upon her YouTube video entitled “I am too sexy.” The video is a remix of the song “I am too sexy” by the British pop band “Right Said Fred” (1992) and a “grab” from “My Little Pony” DVD series.
My analysis illuminates self understandings that fatalshade gained through the process of video production and through feedback received from her audience. My findings indicate that by remixing the two texts: the “innocent” images of “my little ponies” with the “cool” song about sex, fatalshade engaged in creative appropriation, reshaping, and evaluation of those texts through their productive recombination and rearrangement. Ito (2006) emphasizes that through remixing practices users build personalized relationships to those contents. In these views, remixing is seen a way to actively and creatively consume media texts through production of new texts (Baumer, 2007; boyd, 2007). This creative process apparently have also stimulated fatalshade’s self-reflection:
“... I didn’t really make them with anything other than amusement in mind, I didn’t mean for there to be some deeper meaning in them, but I guess it sort of shows the conflict of growing up, of moving out of the childish things we’re used to into the adult world and all that there is in it… umm… they’re cute… and I’ve started collecting them again… though it feels really weird standing in the toy department dressed in mostly black and combat boots looking at ponies… there’s a certain amount of holding onto childhood about them, and just being amused by simple, somewhat pointless things…”
Fatalshade’s narrative contrasts her two identities, her current self “dressed in mostly black and combat boots” and her younger self, a girl who seeks amusement and comfort in playing with little ponies and simple things. Her description of how she feels while watching that video indicates that the video has enabled her to understand the complexity of growing up and confusion around the feelings and desires that teenagers often encounter. Although “started with nothing but amusement” in her mind, the process of video production and sharing has clearly helped fatalshade reach better self-understandings with respect to her feelings and mental states.
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Tags: intertextuality, parody, remix, self-production, self-understanding, youtube
Comments (4)
1: julian at 9:40 pm on Sunday, August 19, 2007
Thanks that was interesting. It also strikes me that Fatalshade must have been around four at the time ‘I’m too sexy’ came out - perhaps the similar age to when she started playing with My Little Pony. So these are conflating in her mind as childhood memories. To our eyes, and to her now, they are very different; but perhaps to her at the time, they were all part of her general experience/environment, and the ‘sexual’ aspect of the song just went over her head.
2: Sonja Baumer at 12:29 pm on Tuesday, August 21, 2007
Dear Julian,
Thanks for your interest. Your comment has made me think not only about the nature of media reception, but also about the nature of meaning-making in general. Psychologist Jerome Bruner suggests that all meaning-making is in principle “interpretive, fraught with ambiguity, sensitive to the occasion, and often after the fact”.
I believe he would definitely agree with you that we do frequently revisit our experiences to find a new meaning in them. Bruner also says that autobiography is the act of constructing a longitudinal version of the self, which is constantly being “rewritten” , as we constantly reinterpret our past in the light of new experiences. For Bruner, this integrative and interpretative work of the consolidation of one’s experiences has been done through self-narration and story telling. Cultural narratives (folktales, legends, novels) in his view are cultural tools that facilitate and aid the construction of our personal autobiographical narratives. I believe that in fatalshade’s case, this integrative work has been done mainly through the creation of video mashup. Thus, (my argument
it seems that the cultural forms of remix and mashup, that are enabled by new digital technologies, are novel cultural tools that can help and enrich youth’s self understanding”
3: Jase at 8:48 pm on Saturday, October 6, 2007
Personally, after being introduced to this video by it creator, it was fun. She has great talent and humor about things. If this was an attempt of recreation by merging two aspects of her lives, I find it extremely healthy not to mention inventive and expressive.
4: Bill from Just Talk About It! Online Community at 12:12 am on Thursday, February 7, 2008
Very nice video, I enjoyed watching it.. Thanks for sharing
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