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

"This article addresses YouTube culture as an arena for its members to use mainstream and sub-cultural media content to create new meanings and narratives. Our interdisciplinary approach is to juxtapose analyses from the perspectives of both media and child studies to understand how content is derived from social and cultural commentary. We present and analyse ways in which images of childhood or preferred notions of the good childhood in idyllic rural or historic settings are re-edited by YouTube video makers into a possible critique of the perceived prescribed childhood. More specifically, we focus on storytelling through visual and auditory means, where content can range from compilations and mash-ups of different images from films, TV, and a wide variety of internet content, to more complex forms where content is elaborately re-edited into a new 'film' with, in addition to the original story, a coherent counter narrative, and elaborate special effects (visual and auditory). We also discuss how the producers can display 'lay professional' competence in participatory media culture, pointing towards how young social media producers display competence that used to belong to an advanced professional skill set.... In this initial survey, we analyse the form and content of a strategic sample of videos uploaded onto YouTube." (Authors, 1-2)