Finding Haley
My freshman year of college, I spent a good amount of my free time browsing the internet. One day while I was sucked into the blackhole that is YouTube, I was introduced to, one of my favorite YouTubers, Haley Pham. She was a quirky, relatable teenage girl from Austin, Texas that loved to document her competitive dancing, do silly things with her friends, review makeup, and talk about her interest in fashion.
On January 31, 2018, she posted a video titled: testing stripper life hacks for shaving my bikini line, which would end up becoming her most watched video to date, sitting at ten million views. Not long after the video was posted, she started to receive more and more views as well as monetization on her videos. As the views started pouring in, more and more people of different backgrounds began to watch her videos and subscribe to her channel. Her increased following began to create problems with students, teachers, and faculty at school so she decided to pull out of public school and complete high school online. This gave Pham more time to focus on her content and videos that she wanted to create for her channel. The increase in content allowed her to purchase better videography equipment and experiment with different types of videos that would perform better than others. She slowly started to drift away from videos that were typical for her channel and into videos that would increase views and income. She began to lose herself in order to please others. But when you lose track of what you want, it’s only a matter of time before you crash. Pham would soon find this out the hard way.
Not Letting It Go
In the fall of 2019, Pham posted a video explaining all the mistakes that she made while on vacation with her boyfriend and mother in Europe. She described her time in Santorini, Greece, and made a comment that Santorini wasn’t a good place to go to, there’s nothing to do there, and that Greece’s economy is not fit for tourism. She received tons of backlash for the comments and a few days later posted an apology video on her vlog channel, Haley Pham Vlogs, in order to try to right her wrong. However, the damage had already been done. Since then both of the videos have been deleted, but still months later after the incident, people have not easily forgotten what she said. Whenever she posts a video on TikTok she receives numerous comments from trolls saying things like: How’s Greece?
After the travel video was posted and deleted, she continued to create her typical clickbaity, influencer-type content and even proceeded to launch her own clothing company, Retro Reprise.
What Wasn't Being Shown
Just a few days before her nineteenth birthday on December 2, 2019, Pham posted a video to her main channel titled: something needs to change. In the video she gives her side of the story to the past few years of her life. She describes how right when her YouTube channel started picking up her parents were in the middle of getting a divorce and her mom also lost her job. Her YouTube revenue allowed her to support her mom and herself during this difficult time. She also stated in the video that for a while now she has not felt like she has been herself in her content and that she hasn’t been vulnerable with her viewers. Since that video, her recent releases have had more resemblance to her older videos in terms of the topics she has chosen. She seems more relaxed during the videos because she’s being less of a performer and more of herself. Also she recently released a new podcast, Call Me Candid, with her friend and small YouTuber, All Things Lily Ann, which I am very excited to start listening to.
Connecting to Mead
Connecting to Mead
Haley Pham’s personal journey and the way she documented it is a great example of Mead’s concept of the “I” and “me”. When Pham began to gain subscribers, her product began to change as well. She was adapting to what she believed people wanted to see and what she thought they expected her to do and act like, appealing to her “me”. But in reality she had just gotten into her own head. It obviously wasn’t what people wanted to see because as her videos started to change so did her comment section. She went from people praising her videos to calling her out for not being herself and receiving hate. Her obsession with what others thought about her actually made her change. When she realized what she had done and that she had lost her “I” in the process, is when she decided something had to change.
Pham isn’t anywhere close to where she once was in terms of her “I” and “me” balance, but I do think that she is headed back to that direction. While I don’t think that she’ll ever be able to go back to the balance she once had because of her increased following, I do think that she is much more aware of her mentality now and will be better at balancing her “I” and “me” in the future when she is faced with new challenges that come with projecting your life onto the internet.
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