Last week I was hanging out with (aka mentoring) another young friend of mine, we’ll call her Aria, and since she didn’t have any homework to do we played on YouTube instead. Still relevant, right?
She was really excited to show me her favorite two vlogs – Anna Akana and Onision. We watched several of each and had a good laugh. The amount of information that she knew about each of them was pretty impressive considering the format.
Anna Akana: Has some interesting messages for girls. She has done a few on love, depression, breaking up, bargaining with god, New York and all sorts of other life associated random topics. Despite the fact that she swears and uses some depictions of gun violence, occasionally talks about getting high and makes penis jokes, her messages are generally pretty positive.
Onision: Is an interesting dude. He does top ten lists, songs, skits, alternate identities, etc, etc. His latest video, posted ONE DAY ago has been viewed – no kidding – 45,612 times. He’s pretty prolific, at over 500 videos.
Here’s why I wanted to tell you about this. While we were watching Onision, Aria said something that stopped me in my tracks. She was referencing the videos and she said “when we talk” and I can’t remember the rest because I was so stunned. Through a series of questions I determined that:
- she knows that they don’t actually have conversations with each other
- the videos elicit an intellectual and emotional response and sometimes a personal identification or relation to the subject matter
- this is part of her forming her persoanlity and finding out what she does and doesn’t like
- because the videos create an emotion, she views it as a conversation.
It occurred to me as being very similar to what some of the students in Wesch’s video pointed out in their first few blogs while musing about the fact that someone will interact with them – they just don’t know when or in what way. THIS is how they are received. As a conversation. With the associated emotions and feelings and even a response. The videographer just doesn’t get to partake in it like we get to do in other mediums such as chat or text or phone or email.
I just thought it was really interesting and wanted to share it with you all. Have any of you noticed the interactions that youth have with their screens?
wendyfujinaga 