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.
Cette étude examine l’utilisation des médias numériques en réponse à des propositions de projets d’extraction de ressources naturelles au sein de deux communautés du Nunavut. En utilisant les concepts de contre-publics et de démocratie délibérative de Dahlberg (2011), l’étude lie les tactiques employées à Baker Lake et à Pond Inlet aux pratiques plus larges d’utilisation des médias numériques par des militants pour réorganiser la vie sociale, politique et économique. En nous inspirant d’une perspective postcoloniale, nous démontrons que les médias sociaux sont incorporés au développement de nouveaux imaginaires politiques.This study examines the use of digital media in two Nunavut communities in response to proposed resource-extraction projects. Using Dahlberg’s (2011) concepts of counterpublics and deliberative democracy, the study links tactics employed in Baker Lake and Pond Inlet to broader activists’ use of digital media to reorganise social, political, and economic life. Drawing on the field of postcolonial studies, these cases demonstrate that social media are being incorporated into the development of new political imaginaries
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