HER name is Bree, and she is schooled at home. She has a lazy eye, and when she was younger she had to wear a patch, which embarrassed her. Her best friend is called Daniel and he really fancies her, but she doesn’t like him in that way.
They may seem like the mundane details of teenage life but to the more than one million YouTube users who have watched the confessions of “lonelygirl15” since she posted her first video three months ago they are a source of great fascination.
Not one of them would have become public were it not for Bree’s strict father, whose authoritarian ways were the reason for her refuge on the internet.
“I was usually stuck studying the Treaty of Versailles or Occam’s razor — making videos was much more fun,” Bree said when she was contacted by The Times this week.
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“I have been open — maybe too open — about my parents, but kids all over the world have written telling me their personal stories and asking for advice. Some people who also come from strict homes have given me hope that there is life beyond what I’m experiencing now.”
According to psychologists, therapy is one of the key reasons why people choose to post video blogs, or “vlogs”. “It’s much easier to tell your problems to complete strangers than it is to tell someone you are intimate with — in which case you have to live with the consequences for life,” said Helen Petrie, Professor of Human Computer Interaction in the Department of Computer Science at the University of York.
“When it’s not face-to-face, people also have more time to reflect on their problems before they talk about them, which can be beneficial.
“There is a deep psychological need to feel that other people are interested in you and care about you,” Professor Petrie said.
There is also the matter of instant fame. More than 100 million videos are watched every day on YouTube.
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YouTube is the most popular video-sharing site in Britain, and the 40th most visited site overall. According to the internet research company Hitwise, it attracts 63 per cent of all video-sharing traffic; its nearest competitor, Google Video, attracts 10 per cent.
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