Uploading selves: Inuit digital storytelling on YouTube

Abstract

<jats:p>This article explores the contemporary use of open-access video-sharing sites by Inuit youth and young adults. Based on 12 months of cyber-fieldwork and focused specifically on YouTube, it explores how Inuit young people across the Canadian Arctic are using online spaces to post short excerpts from their lives and connect with others. The paper situates these digital autobiographies in the recent trajectory of Inuit storytelling, showing that Internet technology allows individual narrators the freedom to bypass established rules and institutions of cultural representation. Self-produced videos posted online are more multivalent, dialogical, and provocative expressions of Inuit selfhood than those texts that may have circulated in the past. While the Internet has been celebrated for its global reach, many of the social relationships and dialogues seemingly fostered by this technology are intimate and localised. Inuit youth and young adults use video-sharing technology to creatively mediate pasts, presents, and futures in the creation of new social worlds.</jats:p>

The new knowledge politics of digital colonialism

“…Communities are much more often connected to pre-existing digital services on the World Wide Web. In the Arctic the most popular use of Internet connectivity is posting and browsing updates on Facebook and other social media sites, in order to interact with family and friends and to connect to the broader world (Castleton, 2014; Wachowich and Scobie, 2010). Unfortunately, relatively little research has yet explored how the epistemic biases of these common digital platforms impact Indigenous knowledge (Young, 2016).…”

Technology and Inuit identity: Facebook use by Inuit youth

“…In the case of these Facebook groups, the aim is to share their experiences, maintain and support their culture and to, as seen in their descriptions, transmit these things to the younger generations. This relates to the observation of other researchers, for example, Wachowich and Scobie (2010), who studied YouTube defining it as a social network that can be used for storytelling through which young Inuit can "bypass the more dominant Western historical consciousness and epistemologies that have traditionally governed media representations of Inuit social life" and "claim their own narrative terrains in cyberspace and beyond" (p. 85). The point here is that social networks seem to be a collection of the meaning of being Inuit, and where photos are exchanged and conversations are carried.…”

Intimate Clips: Sealskin Sewing, Digital Archives and the Mittimatalik Arnait Miqsuqtuit Collective

“…Comparative case studies of media initiatives like ours draw attention to the broader sets of social relations from which they are generated, the "embedded aesthetics" (Ginsburg 1994; see also Geismar 2013) of the setting within which they operate, as well as the relationships or "media worlds" that they inspire (Ginsburg, Abu-Lughod, and Larkin 2002). In the Arctic, media savviness now exists side by side with an understanding of hunting equipment, hunting territories, weather conditions, and skin garment processing and making (Wachowich 2010, Wachowich andScobie 2010). And, as this article sets out to prove, they have, in some ways, become mutually constitutive.…”