The YouTube Selves of Mememolly

This article focuses on a collection of public videos posted to YouTube by a teenage girl who calls herself “mememolly.” Drawing on case study observation and documentation of roughly 18 months of her posting life on YouTube, the article concentrates on how mememolly constructs her online self through the language-mediated practices of her YouTube communications. Applying notions of performance, simulation, and subjectivity, the article suggests that mememolly's case offers an instructive backdrop from which to take up the possibilities, effects, and consequences of creating oneself on YouTube. For mememolly, YouTube serves as a space to enact performances of a routinely changing and changeable self, to simulate fantasies and desires of becoming, and to explore a series of pleasures. More so, it allows her the opportunity to narrate various aspects of her life, to reflexively document these narrations for posterity, and to comment on her world in ways that coexist and compete with her ideas about her mate...