ADOLESCENCE AND THE NARRATIVE COMPLEXITIES OF ONLINE LIFE: ON THE MAKING AND UNMAKING OF YOUTUBE'S ANONYGIRL1.

This article examines the public YouTube profile of AnonyGirl1, the pseudonym used by a teenaged girl who takes to YouTube to narrate various aspects of her life. Using AnonyGirl1's case as an object of analysis, the article considers the new narrative flexibilities that are shaping young people's online explorations of self. On YouTube, where narrative linearity and fixity often come undone, AnonyGirl1 creates herself as a chimera of disappearing and reappearing video fragments that comprise an unstable, constantly changing entirety. In making and unmaking herself in fragments, AnonyGirl1 calls into question the presumed coherences of predominant youth narratives, negotiates her views about being young, and articulates processes of interior self-making through a mode of social expression that gives new form to its fluidities. Although the surfeit of narrative choices that AnonyGirl1 has at her disposal on YouTube come with a series of pleasures, the possibilities for self-construction that these choices provoke also come with debilitating pressures and confusions that she scrambles to negotiate. Amidst these pleasures and confusions, AnonyGirl1's narrative offers a venue through which educators can think through the emerging complexities of young people's online self-making practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]