YouTube, young people, and the socioeconomic crises in Greece

What is it about?

The overriding aim of this paper is to analyse Greek adolescents' digital video making and sharing, the voices they represent in their videos, the dialogical interactions they evoke, and how this activity relates to their everyday lives as they traverse the crises that have taken hold in their country. A focused search of YouTube content was conducted which yielded five videos for analysis. These texts were ‘re-read’ using multimodal analysis and the resulting ‘texts-on-texts’ were analysed using thematic analysis. Via the creation of YouTube videos young people visually convey and communicate their representations of the crises and provide a rich analysis of how the following themes define their lived-experiences: (a) ‘unoccupied youth and occupied dreams yield a sacrificed generation’; (2) ‘blanket condemnation of powerbrokers, their messengers, and mesmerizing mediums’; and, (3) ‘hypnagogia and the insidious enslavement of the psyche’.

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