Learning From YouTube: I Am Fred

By "a jumble of juvenile work" I do not mean to say that Fred's fans' video are made by kids, although most are, but rather that the oeuvre is immature, not fully developed, recording the worst, or simply the most typical sorts of kid behavior—making fun of others from an unself-aware yet aggressive fear of difference. And this is probably true of a majority of people-made video on YouTube: it is juvenile. However, it is my belief that much work by youth is not and need not be juvenile in this sense, that youth media can be refined, complete, and self-aware, and here, I would point to the video work of Lucas Cruikshank himself: the very forebearer of all the mocking, copying, juvenile mash-ups that his fans make to hate him.

Just look at Damien with his 7.1 millions views. This is a mature-enough work. "I am Fred" has an argument ("I am not a Fred Knockoff"), a self-aware style (the video moves from Damien's black and white coherent vblog to a copy of Fred's hyper, stream-of-consciousness style and back again), as well as a self-aware structure. Fred, too, builds a consistent and coherent argument, style, and structure into his oeuvre. Thus, Fred's huge success and popularity is not a function of his youth fans' juvenile tastes (although this is certainly part of his appeal) as much as it is that he successfully, even maturely, works through form and content. With care, talent, and prescience, Fred skims along binaries of impact in our contemporary culture, gracefully walking the line between boredom/distraction, real/parody, and isolation/community. Why can't his fans learn to do the same?