Skip to main content

VIRAL VIDEOS AND SPREDABILITY



By: Joe Zanca

Nowadays it doesn't take much to make a viral video. Just film yourself doing something stupid and you'll most likely gain your 15 minutes of fame on the internet. Sites like YouTube allow anyone the chance to make a viral video. But the creators of viral videos never seem to have the intentions of going viral. For example, the viral video “leave Britney alone”. Chris Crocker (the creator of Leave Britney alone) never intended to go viral when making the video.  Chris was simply expressing his emotions about the way Britney Spears was being treated. Going viral in today's world is easy thanks to video sites like YouTube. The idea of a viral video can be perplexing.  What makes a viral video?  Is it the number of views it has or how fast it spread across all forms of media.  Or is it both of those things?  Viral Videos are described as “the phenomenon in which video clips become highly popular through rapid, user-led distribution via the Internet’’ (Mosebo,2009).  One thing is for sure these videos go viral because of media sites like Youtube.  Videos become viral and popular through sharing.  People can view a video on their phone and then text the link to their friends or group chats.  Technology and media make things very spreadable in today's world.  Music videos are a large category of viral videos.  There are viral videos made by superstars and nobodies. But the videos made by superstars can become viral for different reasons than a video made by a regular person. For example, the music video chocolate rain made by Tay Zonday. The video has received 119,266,469 views to date. The video is low quality and shows the young Tay Zonday (real name Adam Bahner) singing into a microphone, and from time to time pans to his hands playing the keyboard. According to Zonday, he didn't expect the video to go viral. But why did this video become viral? There might not be an exact explanation but there are some reasons. One the beat is very catchy and simple and the lyrics are relatively simple,
Chocolate Rain Raised your neighborhood insurance rates
Chocolate Rain Makes us happy livin‘ in a gate
Chocolate Rain Made me cross the street the other day
Chocolate Rain Made you turn your head the other way
(Chorus) Chocolate Rain History quickly crashing through your veins
Chocolate Rain Using you to fall back down again [Repeat] (Mosebo,2009).
Two there is a certain hilarity of watching the guy almost awkwardly singing into the microphone and moving away from every now and then to take a breath. Three the video was a very popular joke on 4chan. The members of 4chan pushed its popularity on YouTube. This is an example of how powerful media sites can be. What was once a joke is now one of the highest viewed videos on Youtube, and turned Zonday into a celebrity. Youtube is undoubtedly one of the largest sources of videos on the internet. It contains famous and viral videos along with irrelevant videos. Videos like Leave Britney Alone and Chocolate Rain probably have no business being popular or talked about. But because of Youtube and people sharing and talking about the video they are famous and the people who made the videos went from nobodies to somebodies. Youtube makes it easy for videos to go viral.











References Mosebo, T. (2009). Jean Burgess & Joshua Green: YouTube – Online video and participatory culture. MedieKultur: Journal of Media and Communication Research, 25(47), 3. http://eprints.qut.edu.au/18431/1/18431.pdf


Word Count: 603


Labels:

Comments

  1. KHNovember 7, 2018 at 6:32 AM

    Joe,

    Have you looked at this post? How about your collaborators?

    The formatting is a mess. Your title should be ALL CAPS. There's no byline. The font size and style are all wrong. In short, it's unreadable.

    Finally, and most critically, your academic source – a book review not an original research article as required – is written in Danish. Perhaps you're fluent, but my guess is your readers, including yours truly, are not.

    In either event, I have a strong suspicion that you simply plugged in a citation without engaging with this material.

    All told, this fails to meet the basic criteria for this assignment.

    A generous 10 pts.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. KHNovember 7, 2018 at 7:37 AM

      Hi again Joe,

      I simply followed the doi you provided in your reference: 10.7146/mediekultur.v25i47.2132

      In future, be sure to use the proper link in your references.

      KH

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Bisexuality in Popular Television

By Sydney Secuskie Popular culture plays a strong role in the way teens develop and respond to their sexuality. It helps young adults develop a way to interact with their counterparts and helps them get a sense of sexuality and sexual experiences that they may experience in their young lives. However, what happens to this development when the sexuality an individual identifies with is rarely portrayed in popular films and television series? Heterosexuality is normalized within numerous popular television series, making young teens of the LGBTQ+ community struggle to find a character to resonate with. Callie Torres, a bisexual character in the TV hit show Grey’s Anatomy , exemplifies the struggles that many individuals in the LGBTQ+ community face when trying to identify their sexuality. Callie begins the first season as a straight, married female; however, she eventually falls in love with a female doctor after her divorce with her husband. Callie constantly denied her bisexual...
1 comment
Read more

THE HOLLYWOOD LATINA

By: DaBreonna Doss I ran across Jane the Virgin one day in hopes of finding a new series on Netflix. It is about this Latina girl who grows up on strict religious views. She lives with her grandmother and mother, whom was in the country illegally, and she falls in love with a white cop that one night crashed her party. Later, she goes into the doctor for a checkup but instead received an artificial insemination in place of a wife who could not get pregnant. The storyline exaggerates from there, however, there are a few themes that I specifically want to point out. These themes include Jane’s love story, her childhood background, and circumstances her Latina body is placed in. The chapter Mobilizing the Latina Myth by author Priscilla Peña Ovalle in the book In Dance and the Hollywood Latina: Race, Sex, and Stardom exposes the myth of the Latina body and the ways in which Hollywood media and popular culture further these themes. Ovalle begins her analysis by exploring th...
1 comment
Read more

Disney Princesses: A system of commodities?

Disney Princesses: A System of Commodities?  By Katharine McLean Growing up I loved all Disney Princesses, but Cinderella was my favorite by far. I envied her long blonde hair, admired her gorgeous gown, and wished for the day that my Prince Charming would show up on my doorstep with the glass slipper that would turn me into a princess. Now, at the age of nineteen, I cannot help but look back and wonder. . . have the Disney Princesses I’ve grown up with caused me harm? I argue that the stereotypical gender norms found in Disney Princess media and the capitalist nature of popular culture leads to a narrow-minded view of femininity. In Dustin Kidd’s book, Pop Culture Freaks: Identity, Mass Media and Society , he defines popular culture in a myriad of ways, but one that stuck out to me was the idea of popular culture as a system of commodities. Kidd (2014) states, “popular culture is art, transformed into commodity, working double time as advertisement” (p. 69). This d...
6 comments
Read more