Childhood re-edits: Challenging norms and forming lay professional competence on YouTube

This article presents the initial findings of research into how YouTube culture can become an arena for young YouTube videographers to remodel mainstream, sub-cultural, and media content (YouTube clips, music, film content, and viral memes). We juxtapose analyses from both media and child studies to look at the ways in which preferred images and notions of the “good” and idyllic childhood are re-edited into a possible critique of the prescribed Swedish childhood. Also, we look at ways in which these media-literate actors use YouTube to display their skills in both media editing and social media “savvy.” We discuss how “lay” professional competence in digital culture can be inherent in a friction between popular (children’s) culture and social media production, where simultaneous prowess in both is important for how a mediatised social and cultural critique can emerge.

In the films we see "a mingling of cultural critique and expert production that has thus far not been acknowledged in the (adult) cultural or academic sphere. The critique is multi-layered; it produces counter images of, and narratives about, notions of childhood and adulthood, about what is and is not accepted as mainstream culture, and what and who decides what a good production is. The re-edits point to how cultural productions targeting children – Lindgren’s novels and film adaptations – use and re-inscribe idyllic, nostalgic and traditional Western notions of childhood innocence. The effect of the mingling of memes from popular culture and contemporary image cultures with the canonised children’s culture becomes a critique of the adult􏰀–child divide in which childhood signifies an underdog position.... There is [also] another kind of friction involved here, of how young people can be forerunners in media development; of how knowledge is gained by self-organised cultural producers, lay professionals, or lay directors even, who draw on professional production forms, styles, and techniques." (Authors, 9-10 in the pdf version of the text)