Storytelling and Participatory Immersion in the Niilo22 Experience

Abstract

The social media personality Niilo22, real name Mikael Kosola, is a keen user of several platforms and most famous as a highly active YouTuber since 2008. Over the years, he has gained popularity with his video clips that show him engaged in everyday activities. In the eyes of the social media crowd, he can transition from being just his own individual to repre-senting a broader societal trend of voluntary unemployment and living off welfare. Following the antics of a single person, on a social media platform with specific technological features, risks affecting the crowd so that the interaction becomes both generative and representative of collectively judging individuals such as Niilo22. Our aim is to survey the dangers of cre-ating such inequalities in today’s digitalized society. Fictionalizing narrative modes may turn real- world people into stereotypes in the YouTube storyworld through the medium- specific qualities of online storytelling that constitute a special kind of activity and potentially escalate the controversy on societal issues such as unemployment. We observe Niilo22 as a new kind of experience in the social media that distinctly draws on the medium- specific qualities and tech-nological features of the YouTube environment for storytelling purposes. The phenomenon involves users who assume different roles and positions in an ongoing and dynamic process of online storytelling, and we analyse scenes of this interaction as participatory immersion in the Niilo22 experience.