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117 DOI:10.7330/9780874218923.c06 6 Shattering Frames The Crash through YouTube’s Window When Every 15 Minutes was a young program, it was carried by word of mouth from school to school, its emerging traditions passed on among friends and colleagues who knew each other through personal and workplace networks. Local and sometimes national newspapers and television stations put the occasional spotlight on the Grim Reaper and the Living Dead, so improbably macabre in their high school settings. But as E15M matures, its adolescence is taking place in a far more complicated media landscape. I conducted much of the fieldwork on Every 15 Minutes between 1999 and 2003, when teenagers had fewer outlets to publicly express their views and perform for a wide audience. But in a significant shift around 2005 (when YouTube and other video-sharing sites were launched), teenagers became known for compulsively documenting their lives through photos and videos taken with their cell phones, then posting them online, where others view and post comments about them. This new norm and genre revolutionized youth culture, as teenagers quickly became fluent with the means of video production and claimed a starring role in the participatory social media of the new millennium. High school rituals in the age of YouTube are porous events, with surrounding discourses that do not really end—they are replayed, rethought, reinterpreted, reexperienced. As I pointed out in my study of high school proms and their emerging online video archive, adolescents now take for granted their status as subjects to be publicly exhibited and commented on; in fact, many seek out this spotlight (Miller 2010). They also may take a more cynical view toward media spectacle, and make their own sense of 118 Shattering Frames its meaning. Local news still covers the gripping spectacle, repeating the familiar clichés (and misinformed statistics), but now many young people are not just in the spotlight but also agents of it as they collaborate in the distribution of their images through online video. They participate in their own self-display; YouTube is not just a lens through which they record and watch each other, but a tool with which they can add to the dominant discourse about their generation. My observations of Every 15 Minutes have highlighted the degree to which people relish the attention they receive when they take part in this very public event. Teenagers, of course, commonly crave attention, but it may seem that in today’s multiplatform media carnival they place a higher value on celebrity than in the era before the twenty-four-hour infotainment culture. Jake Halpern, in Fame Junkies (2006), cites a 2005 Washington Post/Kaiser Family Foundation/Harvard University survey that found that 31 percent of teenagers think they will become famous one day. The current high school generation seems to continually expose its personal Shattering Frames 119 experiences to the world through YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, spontaneously uploading the dramas of daily life via increasingly advanced mobile devices. As in the past, being in the news is an ideal vehicle to achieve celebrity. Now, however, professional and amateur video bleed together as “news,” and the distinction is irrelevant for teenagers who applaud and mock each other on video-sharing sites. In breaking down the previous boundaries between scripted and spontaneous, YouTube has also changed the nature of folk drama. Teenagers growing up in an age of participatory media seem to accept the online video dimension of their peer culture; they incorporate these videos into the narratives that bond them socially. This new form of digital storytelling dismisses borders of time and space, and adds to the intricacy of the intersecting, overlapping frames in an event such as Every 15 Minutes. In this chapter I present a selection of comments culled from the growing archive of YouTube videos documenting Every 15 Minutes programs across the United States. The comments reflect many of the same reactions and themes that I discovered through my firsthand observations of live events. But YouTube’s lens adds yet another ambiguous frame, further complicating analysis of this multilayered phenomenon. Now we can observe a multivocal audience performing for an online community, disconnected from the real-time context and from contact with the events’ original participants. While interpretations of commenters’ tone, intent, and meaning thus become more difficult than ever, new opportunities also arise. YouTube gives voice to a folk critique generated by the teenage audiences typically silenced in educational and media institutions. This folk critique takes...

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