Kids on YouTube: Technical Identities and Digital Literacies by Patricia A. Lange (review)

Patricia Lange’s Kids on YouTube offers fresh insight into how kids interact with YouTube. Lange places YouTube within the broader category of what she calls “personally expressive media” to better understand kids’ participatory practices as they create their own media. This is a welcome shift in the field of media studies, which too often emphasizes media effects and consumption, rather than production (especially when it comes to youth).

Lange is a detailed anthropologist, and one of the joys of the book is reading how she connects her subjects’ experiences to broader theoretical concepts. She situates her work within established media studies’ theories, yet asks us to question the assumptions and limitations of these theories as they pertain to both youth and YouTube. Her ethnography includes interviews with kids and young adults, ranging from nine to twenty-six years old. She includes analyses of videos and text comments. She attended several in-person YouTube meet-ups or social gatherings. And, staying true to the field of anthropology, she posted videos on AnthroVlog, in an effort to engage users in discussions about the work.

The aim of Lange’s qualitative study is to “investigate the interrelationship between video self-expression, learning opportunities, and technologized aspects of identity” (15). To do this, the book integrates three main concepts. First, personally expressive media is defined as mediated artifacts, such as parodies or video blogs, that help the creator communicate aspects of his or her self. Next, “performing technical affiliation” refers to how kids connect their own technical skills to larger techno-cultural practices. How kids understand their own technological abilities within larger cultural practices is essential for understanding the development of digital literacies. The third concept, “phenomenologies of the mediated moment,” refers to the meaning making behind the artifacts. What decisions are made when kids post a particular video? How do kids think their videos will be received? Each chapter uses these three concepts as an analytical lens to understand the meaning of YouTube in kids’ lives.

In Chapter 2, “Video-Mediated Friendships,” Lange examines the different roles kids take on as they create videos. She looks at “media dispositions,” or the preferences for making certain types of media and engaging in particular media activities. Kids tended to specialize in particular tasks, such as operating the camera, writing, acting, or editing. These details show that media making is a social process, a point that becomes important in understanding the development of digital literacies.

Chapter 3, “Girls Geeking out on YouTube,” contains interviews with fifteen girls ages twelve to nineteen. Lange situates her work within other studies of girls’ media production, arguing that these studies narrowly look at non-technical aspects of self, such as gender, ethnicity, and class. Instead, Lange persuasively advocates for technology as an identity variable because girls and women embrace technical skills and affiliations as important components of their identities. Indeed, many of the girls in Lange’s study highlighted the ways in which their technical identities were created and negotiated, especially as they identified as “geeks.” The girls in her sample stray from usual findings that girls are not as confident in their technical abilities, leading Lange to conclude that we need to broaden our understanding of the intersections of technology and identity. This move is nicely executed in Lange’s discussion of how girls’ respond to comments about their videos. Feedback is an important component of girls’ technical identities, especially for feeling a sense of accomplishment. Negative commentary or “haters,” those who post mean-spirited comments, can be detrimental to girls’ technical identities. Lange uses these findings to offer specific suggestions about how to include gender equality in formal classroom teaching.

The focus of Chapter 4 is kids’ participation in contemporary civic issues. Again, Lange challenges assumptions of current research, this time arguing that civic engagement literature often looks at kids’ future participation in political activities rather than trying to understand...