viz. - viral videos

Let’s Stay Together, America: Obama’s Viral Campaigns

Rachel Schneider — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 07:25:28 +0000

While ostensibly Tuesday’s State of the Union address was President Obama’s most important speech of the week, his performance at an Apollo Theater fundraiser last Thursday stole the spotlight. The reason for this, of course, was because he sang a few bars from Al Green’s classic song “Let’s Stay Together.”

While Obama’s presidency thus far has not avoided criticism, his singing seems to have garnered him praise from far and wide. Many individuals—from one linker at BuzzFeed who commented on “Barack’s sick falsetto!” to Reverend Green himself, who thought that Obama “nailed it”—enjoyed seeing their very serious President sound a softer note. A search on Twitter for “Obama Al Green” pulls up a number of results, including tweets like these:

Image Credit: Screenshot from Twitter

Indeed, if tweets like LeVar Burton’s can be taken as general, Obama’s tune seduced an audience beyond the screaming supporters at the fundraiser. The choice of song, which Obama chalked up to Rev. Green being in the audience, might have been intention—a parallel can easily be drawn between the song’s narrative and Obama’s situation. Like the singer of “Let’s Stay Together,” Obama is attempting to retain the affections of a lover ready to leave. If Obama’s popularity decreased over the last few years, he’d like his union with America to last “whether / Times are good or bad, happy or sad.” What might be different between now and 2008—among many things—is that here Obama actually is making his own viral video instead of being the subject of them. Back in 2008 on this blog Jillian Sayre noted the numerous songs and videos posted online about Obama and concluded that “Obama's participatory rhetoric seems to elicit a creative response that belies an identification (perhaps over-identification) with the candidate.”

The Atlantic writer Ta-Naheisi Coates comes to a similar conclusion in his post on Obama’s relationship with the black community. And while some elements of this moment—like the Apollo Theater, the reference to the Sandman, and the choice of Al Green—might strike African-American voters in a particular way, Coates notes that the desire to turn Obama into a symbol is shared by all:

One way to think about this is remember that black people are people, and that all people turn human beings into symbols, whatever the person's actions. It's worth thinking about why we -- as humans -- do this. What need are we fulfilling? What ache are we ministering to? What is this need -- among us all -- to represent for our team?

Obama’s musical moment is an intentional appeal, but we the people are the audience who makes it viral. (In fact, audiences read texts looking for Obama, as when Gawker suggested Obama was in the Tag Team's 1993 video for "Whoomp (There It Is)") What is it about this President Obama that makes us want to vote for him, or put him in musical viral videos? Is this his equivalent of the prior President’s Bushisms? One difference between Bush and Obama, however, is that Bush never inspired anything like the Obama Girl or caused anyone to Tweet anything like: "Watched Obama sing Al Green. I'm pregnant now." Obama, more so than any other modern President (with the possible exception of Bill Clinton) is subject to objectification (like when paparazzi photographed him shirtless in Hawaii). I'm not sure if this is a result of his participatory rhetoric, which encourages identification, or whether the public is turning Obama into yet another symbol of something we need. This, at least, seems far more benign than Republicans turning him into a communist Muslim.

Mechanized Spectacle: Lo-Fi Effects for Viral Content

Rachel Schneider — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 04:14:02 +0000

Image Credit: Screenshot from YouTube

H/T: Hampton Finger

Lucky for you and me that before I started working on my blog post today that my friend Hampton asked me if I’d seen the new OK Go video for “This Too Shall Pass,” and thus I stumbled onto a much more interesting debate than any engaged in by any Texas Republicans running for the governorship.

The above video does a great job of catching the audience’s attention, as it features an enormous and complex Rube Goldberg machine (apparently created from a collaboration between the band and Syyn Labs) that not only moves a car and drops a piano, but also contributes to the song by playing music at one point. While the song itself is pleasant, the video’s visual interest overwhelms it, especially as the lyrics themselves aren’t terribly memorable. Considering that OK Go first achieved major success with their clever video for “Here It Goes Again,” in which they do a choreographed dance on treadmills, this video simply seems to fit into an artistic identity that the band has built for itself.

However, what is interesting to note is that, prior to releasing this video yesterday, the band had recorded a video for the song with the Notre Dame marching band that was released in early January. Why this video didn’t go viral as their new video (the latter of which already has generated 1.2 million YouTube hits, more than the previous one) is because their record label, EMI, initially refused to allow the first video to be embeddable on other websites. As noted by several websites, this created a controversy. The band responded not only by writing an open letter to their fans on their website, but also by publishing an op-ed in the New York Times authored by their lead singer Damian Kulash. His argument considers the power of music videos as artistic statements and financial cash machines, and asserts that EMI neglects both interests by prohibiting embedding.

He starts off the article by asserting his band’s interest in their videos as an extension of their art:

My band is famous for music videos. We direct them ourselves or with the help of friends, we shoot them on shoestring budgets and, like our songs, albums and concerts, we see them as creative works and not as our record company’s marketing tool.

However, what’s also interesting to note is that he represents the videos as much as branding devices as a creative product when he alludes to how his band is “famous” for the videos. OK Go has profited financially from viral Internet success, and Kulash isn’t afraid to admit it. However, his warning to EMI is particularly potent. While they make money from making people view the videos on YouTube, they miss out on the long-term benefits of viral success:

In these tight times, it’s no surprise that EMI is trying to wring revenue out of everything we make, including our videos. But it needs to recognize the basic mechanics of the Internet. Curbing the viral spread of videos isn’t benefiting the company’s bottom line, or the music it’s there to support. The sooner record companies realize this, the better — though I fear it may already be too late.

Kulash’s eloquence here is directed towards the bottom line: the band and EMI will only profit if people are interested in the band, and online videos now serve the purpose that radio once did. However, the “This Too Shall Pass” also raises questions as it builds onto the low-fi aesthetic of their famous “Here It Goes Again” video, which now has almost 50 million views on YouTube.

OK Go - Here It Goes Again from OK Go on Vimeo.

They’ve also played into a curiosity about their video by posting a series of making-of clips on their YouTube channel in a way that reminds me of the also-viral Old Spice commercial from the Super Bowl, “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like.”

A part of this commercial’s success lies in its lo-fi appeal as well as its success. The advertising company behind the commercial admitted in an interview that the commercial was made in one take with no CGI, something that seems almost as impossible as OK Go’s Rube Goldberg machine. I think there’s something fascinating about the mix of viral Internet advertising and old-fashioned creative trickery that also speaks to a desire for an experience with the real (which may be a part of the appeal that The Hurt Locker has over Avatar, and why Roger Ebert is picking the former for Best Picture) in the midst of technological innovation. “Home made” art, as OK Go describe their video, just may be more appealing than anything else, especially as the emphasis is on the performance over the technology. (Maybe this is why State Farm’s logo is hidden in the video on the truck that starts the dominos: advertising is best done in a subtle and artistic fashion.)

As a teacher using technology and as a researcher interested in its implications, I wonder what such desires reveal in my students, and whether the use of high technology works best for them when it is least explicit and obvious.

The Glee Effect: New Media Marketing for Old Institutions

Rachel Schneider — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 20:52:57 +0000

Screenshot Credit: YouTube

Zounds! After Noel’s heartwarming welcome-back posting, I feel reinvigorated and ready to begin posting again here at viz. I did rest my blogging muscles over the break, but managed to take a few notes for what will hopefully be more piquant posts on pop culture.

Recently, my friends have helpfully provided me with such a deluge of musical material that I don’t know what to do with it all. My friend Cate Blouke forwarded me the NPR story about HOPE: The Obama Musical, which delights me to no end—but I was a little more intrigued by a video my friend Meghan Andrews brought to my attention—a short-form musical YouTube video that doubles as a Yale advertisement called “That’s Why I Chose Yale.”

While I might critique the video for what seems to me to be an excessive length (it’s over 14 minutes, and starts to drag during the long list of student activity groups), what I find fascinating about this is that what seems to be one of the most traditional American universities is choosing to brand themselves using the most current cultural trends: the YouTube viral video and the unexpected musical. While Andrew Johnson, the Yale graduate who dreamed up the idea, disclaims that he was influenced by shows like Glee and High School Musical, the “campiness” noted by Matthew Nojiri of ABC seems very influenced by Glee’s particular brand of snark and softness.

What Nojiri doesn’t discuss is that these attempts to advertise colleges are a long-standing trend. A former professor of mine, Mark Edmundson, wrote a wildly controversial essay called “On the Uses of a Liberal Education: As Lite Entertainment For Bored College Students” for Harper’s in September 1997 which critiqued universities for marketing themselves to students “immersed in a consumer mentality.” This ad does just that, selling things like Yale’s residential colleges (and their organic meals) alongside experiences like “monitor[ing] a foreign election. / And now I volunteer at a law school clinic on human rights protection.” While both things might appeal to a student body, there’s something uncomfortable about suggesting that the university is another fashionable purchase to make alongside a Wii or a hipster shirt, or that volunteering at law school clinics is cool because cute girls do it while sitting in fabulous new buildings.

Glee, as I’ve already noted, markets itself as dramatic irony; what is more interesting about the Glee
phenomenon is how successfully it has turned itself not only into a popular television show, but also an iTunes phenomenon where individuals can buy cast recordings of the songs, and season DVDs before the season is even fully finished. Taking advantage of the appeal of old 80s songs and new R&B htis, Glee is helping make FOX serious money in a time when media conglomorates are trying to find ways to monetize the web. While it’s understandable that in a time of financial crisis even Ivies like Yale want to seek out the greatest number of possible undergraduates to fund their coffers, there’s something disturbing about a university marketing itself like a musical. Is the slick marketing of “That’s Why I Chose Yale” a little too knowing? What is the substance underneath which this video is meant to express? Or is it a good sign that professors seem to be rethinking what they're doing as not merely educating, but selling valuable skillsets and educational services for a newly media-savvy generation? Maybe Yale's Glee-ification is just all in good honest American fun, like the musical itself.

Rock the Vote

Jillian Sayre — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 19:02:39 +0000

Obama supporters have been called fanatical and naive but something that we've also noticed is that they are also rather musical. MK noted the Will.I.Am video and McCain parody here and Tim posted the somewhat...let's say cheesy...response from Clinton supporters here. Starting with the "Obama girl"'s song (who, it turned out later, didn't vote), and helped along by the accessibility of web publishing, Obama's participatory rhetoric seems to elicit a creative response that belies an identification (perhaps over-identification) with the candidate.

Here in Texas we've got two new videos hitting the tubes. The first attempt to argue against the widely held conception that Clinton is the candidate for Latino (and in this case Mexican American) voters:

The corrido emphasizes Obama's humble roots, flashes pictures of him in crowds of people, and argues "his fight is our fight."

The second, recently composed by Austin singer Kat Edmonson:

The video asks the question "What would you do if you were president?" and flashes to different people holding their answers in the form of cardboard signs. What intrigues me about the Will.I.Am video and these two latest incarnations is the various ways that they argue an identification with Obama, in the "we" "our" and (notably missing) "I" that signifies a corporate or cooperative identity.
It makes me think of the larger ideas of collaborative composition that inhere to ideas of New Media and Web 2.0 and I think it is interesting to consider how this "new idea" for politics that people attach to Obama might be a larger "new idea" of culture.

YouTube fights the law: Who will win?

John Jones — Wed, 28 Mar 2007 15:18:10 +0000

Andrew K. Woods has a short piece on Slate titled “The YouTube Defense: Human Rights Go Viral” where he argues that judicial decisions, from Brown v. Board of Education to recent rulings on Guantanamo detainees, have always used public opinion as a bellwether, despite claims of strict fidelity to established law. Realizing this, lawyers for one Gitmo inmate, Adel Hamad—who Mr. Woods identifies as a Sudanese school teacher—have posted a video on YouTube outlining the paucity of evidence supporting to his detainment. After 70,000 viewings, the U.S. government has placed Hamad on a list of detainees to be released.

These facts lead Mr. Woods to argue that Internet video provides the following benefits for human rights reporting: it allows anyone to report on abuses, and that reporting can instantly reach everyone with an web connection; it is more “visceral” than text; and it is “story first, message second,” allowing the video-makers to “capture [an audience’s] attention with the narrative, and slip the message in between the frames,” in this case, a message about human rights.

I generally agree with Mr. Woods’s claims about the differences between video and text, though perhaps not with his specifics—the Internet has been around for a while, and I’m sure someone knows of an example of a text-based (or text- and graphics-based) campaign that influenced some legal or governmental decision, and I’m not sure that, in their essential natures, text is quite so intellectual or video quite so emotional as Mr. Woods is claiming. The argument does, however, bring up the question: what benefits do video, and sites like YouTube, make available to human rights groups and others that would like to draw attention to arguments that would otherwise go unreported in the media?

Here is my suggestion: because video is richly contextual, that is, because it provides information about setting, behavior, physical appearance, and other details that would be tedious or merely time-consuming to list in print in their entirety, it allows for the greater likelihood of an audience member emphasizing with the subject—or being repelled by them; consider the difference in reaction to Mel Gibson and Michael Richards’s racial outbursts; how much of the public response to each has been mediated by the fact that most everyone has seen one outburst but not the other?—and therefore has the potential to be more persuasive. One downside of this effect is that text has the benefit of being streamlined; it is easier to focus an audience’s attention with text than with video. Also, more people are skilled producers of text than they are of video (though the gap between the two is quickly narrowing), making it likely that, at least for the foreseeable future, there will be rhetorical gaffes in video production.

With that caveat, however, I believe that Mr. Woods is correct. Video production on the web is going to propel major changes in the way groups without access to the media will be able to make arguments to wide audiences, thereby effecting changes in legal decisions and governmental policies.