Film Transcript

YouTube is not merely an archive for videos, rather an important site of exchange and participation among a network of users. Globally, every minute 13 hours of video material is uploaded by the sites 3,75 million users – 25% of these are youth between the ages of 12 and 17.

Swedish youth are well represented on the site, and are creating and making accessible films that run the gauntlet between diary-like video diaries, to mash-ups, and to innovative, experimental films that blend both an awareness of the physical space, as well as the digital. These videos represent a hybridization of the online/offline space.

The project, YouTube as a performative arena will examine the video-sharing site, YouTube as an arena for creative and artistic expression among Swedish youth. The project will bring together cross-disciplinary research in order to gain a better understanding of how youth use these arenas, as well as how the YouTube phenomenon is understood and defined by the traditional, adult-managed media landscape.

The first study of this three-part research project is an ethnographic examination of YouTube as a hybridization of online and offline performative spaces. Three groups of YouTube users will be interviewed in order to determine motivations, influences, as well as identify potential social significance both in their offline and online lives. These groups will include a Stockholm based flashmob group, a Gothenburg based parkour group, and a group of youth that use YouTube as a political platform.

The second study attempts to map and contextualize discourse surrounding youth’s critical making on YouTube in order to critically analyze how YouTube is both defined and described by traditional mass media. This discourse can range anywhere from a descriptive representation to ‘media panics’ which are often typified by features such as exaggeration and unfounded generalizations.

The third part of this project will use YouTube as a case study of a multimodal, expressive and social web place that challenges the broadened notion of text as presented and implemented in the Swedish school system. This will partly be done in collaboration with schools from Umeå, Sweden, who will create their own YouTube films, which will be presented in a channel for this project. From those films, the Swedish author Peter Kihlgård will create a literary text, which will be reconnected back to the original films. The combined works will be presented online and in an installation at Umeå University, and will be used to generate a dialogue about how performative and creative arenas can realize an expanded notion of text in education.

These three projects cut across the disciplines linguistics, sociology, IT pedagogy, and comparative literature in order to examine emergent uses of video among youth in Sweden and it’s potential importance as a tool of learning and communicating in increasingly hybridized digital-physical arenas.