Abstract
People use media-sharing web sites to document their lives and those of their children for maintaining and strengthening social ties with people living away. It is clear then that people can and like to create narratives as a form of expression. This study presents an analysis of the characteristics and type of baby stories written by young mothers. Nine mothers from Malaysia living in the UK participated in the study. The participants used a variety of media-sharing web sites to prepare and share the narratives. Most of them (seven) used photo-sharing web sites (Fotopages or Flickr), two used text-based blogs (Blogger). Two of them also uploaded videos of their babies in content sharing sites (YouTube). Within the period of three months, we identified 166 stories created, with 94 percent of them focusing on their baby. The stories present a number of topics such as skills demonstrations, outings, domestic activities, and social events. Based on the analysis of the data and interviews with participants, we found a significant positive correlation between the type of story and the type of media used. The result also shows there was a significant positive relationship between the type of story and the baby's age.
Highlights
In modern society, more and more people have experienced the challenge of communicating and maintaining long distance relationships due to business, marriage, military deployment, working or studying
Our research focuses on family communication as maintenance of strong ties with friends and family are of uppermost importance for many people living
The Malaysian Student Overseas Statistics Report 2002-2007 published by the Malaysian Ministry of Higher Education (MOHE), states that the UK and Ireland are the most favourite places to study after Australia [9]
Summary
More and more people have experienced the challenge of communicating and maintaining long distance relationships due to business, marriage, military deployment, working or studying. Recent studies by Gonzalez and Kurniawan [5] and Harley and Fitzpatrick [6] have shown that YouTube can be a suitable tool for intergenerational communication Both studies examined the YouTube user Geriatric1927, an older adult who updates his blogs in YouTube. They highlighted the value of video-based communication to share experiences, avoid isolation, and facilitate dialogue. The video story is the richest media as it contains multiple cues (movement, sound, visual and potentially text), high in language variety (people with other languages can understand it by looking at the video, especially when it involves movement) and high in personal focus of emotion because one can hear the baby cry or can see the movement that conveys emotions. Our study is guided by two main research questions: 1. What are the types of stories created by people wanting to share the life of a baby?
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