Qualitative Content Analysis of North Korean Defectors' Self-Representations On Youtube

Abstract

This thesis explores self-representations of North Korean defectors on the online video sharing platform YouTube. In South Korea there has been a growing interest towards reality television shows that feature North Koreans. Previous scholarship has largely criticized the narrow representations that these television programs offer, claiming that they enforce an image of South Korea as superior and portray the defectors as victims. Recently there has been a significant increase in the self-created content that defectors upload to the social media site YouTube. The objective of this study is to investigate what kind of representations appear in this growing amount of content and to see whether it can offer a more diverse image of North Korean defectors. Online self-representation in this study is understood as a performance, following Erving Goffman’s conceptualization where he used theatrical metaphors to explain how individuals represent themselves in social situations. The primary data for this study was collected from YouTube, and secondary research is used to make comparisons between mainstream media and YouTube representations. The self-representations are investigated in this study through a qualitative content analysis that allows us to seek out the most common themes in the videos. The findings suggest that the self-representations on YouTube are largely constructed for entertainment purposes, but there are also possibilities for contesting mainstream media narratives. Further research is needed to explore the motivations of the content creators themselves as well as the reception these videos have gotten.