Monday, February 9, 2009

You are what You Youtube?

So I was reading Professor Strate' blog post "you are what you tweet" and it reminded me of a youtube video a posted a while back. More specifically , it reminded of the comments I received on the video (the video is basically a rap spoof of a Three 6 Mafia song; I posted it on the blog earlier). Most of them were, very nice:

_________________________________________________________
crowdedsubwaystation:
"haha, i freakin love this video. way better than the original. nice editing."
"Whenever I want to listen to this song, I just watch this video. It's much more amusing and fun to watch. Great job! I'd love to see another."
"that´s really great...better than the original....*laugh* !!!!Great.."
_________________________________________________________

But some of the comments were a little personal and vindictive at times:

_________________________________________________________
"if i ever catch one u fags in the street, u gonna get slapped."
"10000000000% faggots you all like big @#$ @#$% and you just wasted my time with this gay @#$%@#$ music video go play with a gun!"
badassrican:
"U want to kno wat i dont understand. White people always say blacks are ignorant but i never seen a vid wer a black was makin fun of a punk or rock song wat eva u want to call it but white r always tryin to make good hiphop vids like if they corny i got a message for ya, stop havin ya head up everybodys azz werin wats der business nd shit nd do wat u gots to do for yo self feel wat im sayin???"
_________________________________________________________

When I first posted the video I thought of it as a silly thing to do in my spare time. But I soon realized that whenever you put something on a public forum, you are sending a message about who you are. Strate writes:

When you tweet, you are not just transmitting information, you are establishing an identity, constructing a persona or self

When you tweet, you are projecting a definition of who you are, and your relationship to your "followers" and readers

Your followers and readers in turn take part in defining who you are, based on what you tweet

In other words, you are what you tweet!

Now I know youtube is a different type of
public forum then Twitter but I think the same concept applies here. On youtube, the videos you favorite and the videos you post create "your persona, your self". But this is why I like public forums. The persona I create there is far beyond what I am like in reality. In reality, me and my friends don't listen to hip hop and memorize the lyrics to popular rap songs. On youtube however, this is who I am. I therefore found the comments not only innofensive but also entertaining because this "persona" is not reality. I feel as if people are attacking a figment of my imagination, not me personally. Yeah for public forums!!

1 comment:

  1. Good point. I think it's easier to see how, on YouTube, you are not just conveying content, but also presenting an image of yourself. To some extent, we can try to manage the impression we create. But to some extent, people are free to construct their own impression, so the person we are online is a figment of our imagination and the audience's as well.

    ReplyDelete