POV: It’s 2007, and you are wearing your bumpit. You are texting on your bright pink flip phone, hanging out at the mall with your friend. You used your allowance to buy pretzel bites from Auntie Anne’s.
POV: You are getting ready to go to the club in 2012. Your friends help you decide on the perfect outfit. Your hair is in a sock bun. You have a striped peplum top on. A chunky mint statement necklace hangs around your neck. “Wild Ones” by Flo Rida plays in the background.
Content creators who draw inspiration from their personal but universal millennial experiences, like Kate Steinberg and Erin Miller, make rhetorical choices to appeal to millennials, who want to look back on their teenage years. Whether to laugh at them, miss them, or experience a funny combination of both, they allow both people who relate to them or generations that copy them now to understand what it was like growing up in those times. How can this be done? The answer: digital literacy.
What Do I Need to Know to Understand These POV’s?
These content creators play with easily controllable factors to embrace the good old days. This includes the types of clothes they wear, the music they play, and the overall video aesthetic. All of this is done in a way that other millennials can relate to it, while also being a way for both younger and older generations to poke fun at them. By becoming easily recognizable via their presentation, onlookers can use their context clues to observe and understand the message behind the skit.
Users have to understand the time period and cultural identifiers to relate to it and enjoy it. To be digitally literate, viewers of the content need to understand and decipher the significant cultural context. All of this is provided by the audio and visual choices of the creators. Without them, there would be little reason to post any POV videos, as no one would understand their millennial relatability!
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