On YouTube people are displaying more and more personal, private and humiliating things, such as the video viewed above. The woman is obviously taping herself stretching, and knows that it is humiliating as she is an obese woman; exposing her stomach, yet still she posts it for the world to see. Because of YouTube, people are doing more and more humiliating things just to get noticed and to shock viewers. It is a sad reality when things such as this are used to grab people’s attention; that someone has to lower themselves to such a level as this in order to feel somewhat accepted.
The internet is being transformed by us since we are now the ones controlling the content of the internet as opposed to others choosing it. Through mediums such as the television, the audience have always had the content of what they are going to watch and when they will watch it chosen for them. This made our society highly collective as we would all be viewing the same shows and then be talking about it together the next day. However, now with the internet and sites such as YouTube, the audience can now watch whatever they want whenever they want, creating a highly fragmented society. On the online article called Cinema Journal, it states that “On user-generated sites, as the name implies, the public uploads content…, whereas in traditional publishing… the professionals chose and control the content.” Therefore we are now getting more of the everyday content that we normally never see at anytime, anywhere. This content is being captured by people who happen to be somewhere at a specific place at a specific time, who happen to have a device to record it.
The public will continue to upload humiliating videos as a way to receive attention from people around the world and there is no one that will be able to stop this from happening as the internet is an uncontrolled medium. As these videos continue to be posted and viewed, the more and more the public will desire the shock value of them which will ultimatley lead to videos that contain the extreme images, which is a scary thought because it is hard to think what kind of harsher images can you create in order to keep the shock value of the audience at ease?
Sources: Peter Lehman. Cinema Journal. University of Texas Press. Summer 2007.
March 12, 2009 at 9:21 pm |
I find this really interesting. I think its really weird how this is happening. I know personally, that doing something humiliating to gain attention is something that I would never do. I just cannot seem to understand why people are doing this…. and you are right by saying what will be next if people are going to keep needing more and more to keep their attention.