Browsing by Subject "vlog"

The purpose of this study is to find out how do Finnish children and adolescents portray their free time and school on their YouTube videos. Social media is nowadays a big part of life of almost every children and adolescent in Finland. Especially the video sharing site YouTube is really popular among younger generations. The level of school satisfaction is traditionally quite low in Finland, even though pupils generally regard school as an important part of their life. That’s why it is interesting to find out whether they bring out their school dissatisfaction also on their YouTube videos. I’m focusing mostly on the content of the videos, but I’ll also clarify, why do children and adolescents publish such videos they do and tell the things they tell in the videos. The research material consists of 10 diary-like vlog videos from 10 different vloggers, aged from 9 to 15. The videos were uploaded to YouTube during years 2016–2018. My method for data gathering was IRI-research (Investigative Research on the Internet) and I used content analysis to analyze the videos. After the analysis I then compared the findings to different surveys about children and adolescents’ free time and social media and internet usage. I also compared the findings to some studies about children and adolescents’ social relations. Vloggers researched in my study produce mostly basic diary-like description of their everyday life on YouTube. One interesting finding of this study was though that many of the videos included presentations of clothes and belongings. By showing their clothes and telling where they were bought from, the children and adolescents try to increase their social income and, in this way, improve their status among their peers. School was mentioned quite a lot in the videos. The children and adolescents talked for example about their schooldays, teachers, school supplies and also their feelings about school. School was mostly referred to either in a neutral or a negative way. Talking about school negatively can also be seen as a way of trying to improve status among peers, in a similar way as the presentation of clothes and belongings. In addition to information about children and adolescents’ free time and opinions about school, the results of this study give also further information about the meaning and role of social media as part of their social relations.