I am not kidding. Growing up as an only child, I spent 99% of my time recording myself on my mom’s old white MacBook. I am talking about YouTube challenges, singing videos, and random videos with friends GALORE. I have cringe-worthy videos and pictures of myself from the ages of six to twelve. That is SIX YEARS of embarrassing (and now pretty hilarious) content. And I have videos of everything: cooking, eating, room tours, ‘Guess What’s in My Hand’, skits, talk shows, two-hour-long content of me sitting there doing my homework, and more. I grew up right when YouTube was becoming mainstream, and I always loved watching the famous YouTubers of that time. I thought that I had my life figured out: I was going to be famous.
Long story short: that did not happen. My old channel has long since been deleted (so do not go and try to look it up! haha), and now I get to shamefully enjoy all of the content I made from my childhood. I remember my mom also had a little point and shoot camera and I used to take pictures EVERYWHERE, and sometimes even try and vlog like I was some famous internet sensation. To top it all off, I have thousands of PhotoBooth pictures of myself and my friends/cousins.
Due to personal circumstances when I lived in Tokyo, I spent a lot of my time at home and I had to find ways to entertain myself. Filming became an obsession and was a source of comfort and happiness for me (a majority of the content I made did not end up online). When I was filming or taking pictures, I wasn’t alone. The camera was there keeping me company! The thing that amazes me the most is considering how much time I spent on iMovie, I still literally know nothing about video editing and/or production 😂 .
On a serious note, being able to film myself and having access to the internet allowed me to feel like I was a part of a community. I felt like I belonged, which is extremely important when growing up. I am really glad now that I filmed what I did because I get to experience some fun parts of my childhood again. This digital media exposure shaped a lot of my memories of my childhood and affected what I can/cannot remember from my youth. I have not figured out if this is a good or bad thing yet. I feel like I could have probably spent more time playing outside, yet at the same time, it is a unique part of me. Overall, the thing I enjoy most is going back every few years and watching random videos of me and my friends. I get to laugh and smile and return back to those moments, which is something that I will always cherish. The internet, film, and digital media have been a major part of my life from the start. I just hope that I’m not the ONLY person who did this as a kid 😅 , so let me know if you did stuff like this too. Then we can all cringe together.
Thank you so much for your blog post! Firstly, I can imagine how hard it was for you to be in a country which has a completely different language and culture, especially as a small kid. As you mentioned, I think feeling like you belong to a certain kind of group is very important and for that purpose, online medium is a great tool. I also talk to my Japanese friends online when I perform badly during a class or when something sad happened to me while I am in this country. By having these people who do not know anything about my life here, I feel like I am living in two different worlds and this is helping me a lot with staying mentally healthy. I am so impressed that you found the way when you were little. Again Thank you so much for sharing your memory.
Thank you for sharing your story! You’re not alone! I didn’t really know about Youtube until I was 12 so I didn’t do it in the same form, but with my sister and cousins at the age of 8(ish) we started a commercial production company. We had meetings where we discussed our very serious ideas and scripts for new commercials and then using my dad’s phone we recorded them. We even thought about sending our ideas to TV. Sometimes as a fun break from our production we were recording movies about wizards because we figured out that if you press “pause” and “start” then it looks like teleportation! Well how embarrassing it might be now, I think that things like this are good experiences. And I believe that you would be a great famous Youtuber!