Going viral (by accident)

Another fall semester here at the University of Alabama brings another media-related kerfuffle involving our students. Last fall, a student made a threatening comment on a UA sorority's YouTube video, which set in motion a campus-wide panic that circulated through social media (YikYak in particular) and lasted several days. This week's incident involves yet another UA sorority's YouTube video, but this time it centers on the video itself rather than a comment on a video. And, like the last incident, it makes for a teachable moment that is highly relevant to all undergraduate students (particularly those who were actually in the video, some of whom may be in my classes).

The video, which may or may not be available by the time you read this, was a recruitment video depicting the members of a sorority smiling and waving at the camera, dancing around, and doing what I would describe as frolicking. This is the first lesson: part of the difficulty of discussing any kind of media content is describing it. Each person will likely highlight some aspect of the content and leave out other aspects. One could note that all of the sorority sisters were white, or good-looking, or thin, or that the cinematography and editing was very professional looking for a student production, or that the young women don't seem to actually do much in the video. Coverage of the video in mainstream news and in blogs provide an excellent example of media framing: the aspects of the video that are mentioned are not chosen at random, but rather chosen so as to promote (or at least discuss) one of many possible interpretations.

The spread of the video also provides a good case study of audiences in the age of viral content. Many lessons on media creation start with the question: who is your audience? The answer to this question informs everything from aesthetic choices to the medium or venue through which you disseminate your message. In most cases, the Internet allows for a precise calibration of the relationship between content and audience, much more precise than the big-tent, shotgun approach more commonly used in old-school broadcast media. But in some cases, like this sorority video, content specifically tailored for a very small audience escapes into the wild. By now, there is a long list of media content, in particular YouTube videos, intended for a small, specific audience that, through no intention of its creators, found a much larger audience.

The prototypical example of this is Rebecca Black's Friday. Part of the pleasure of this kind of viral content, part of what makes it unique, is a result of the disjuncture between intended audience and actual audience. We're so used to seeing content that is either tailored to us or intended for a homogeneous audience that it is novel to see content that was so obviously not designed for us. Seeing this kind of content raises the question: "what were they (the creators, the target audience) thinking?" Like some kinds of reality TV, this type of content gives us a window into a culture and mindset that is foreign to us.

Also, like the Rebecca Black video, what makes the UA sorority recruitment video worth watching for so many people is that there are different ways to hate it or enjoy it. Some viewers seem to have taken unironic pleasure in the attractiveness of the video's stars, others laugh at its apparent earnestness, and others use it as evidence of an argument about the homogeneity of Greek organizations, and UA sororities in particular, or of how oblivious said sororities are of this fact, or of some aspect of a hegemonic culture that has inculcated the video's creators with this inability to see the underlying message that the video is sending, or that there is nothing wrong nor remarkable about the video and that the reaction to the video is indicative of political correctness run amok. The popularity of the video, the number of clicks and shares it gets, doesn't take into account which of these interpretations or reactions the user has. And, of course, the networked nature of social media and the way in which YouTube and similar sites highlight the number of clicks and shares facilitate the process: we watch it and talk about it because it is what everyone is watching and talking about.

I'm excited to find out what happens next, and to be a part of helping something positive come out of all this. It feels as though it could go either way. It could be yet another cultural object used to bludgeon people on the other side of the cultural divide, a prop in an escalating online shouting match. I imagine that such an experience would be thoroughly demoralizing to the content creators, prompting them to become deeply cynical about public discourse, causing them to "play it safe" by not sharing anything online or creating the most bland, benign content they can think of.

But I hope it doesn't turn out that way. I hope it leads to deeper reflection on what the video depicts, how it depicts its subjects, and how it is received by an audience with diverse, often diametrically opposed, viewpoints. If our students can get past the initial sting of intense scrutiny, I think they can learn a lot about the power of media. It certainly won't be hard to convince these students of the relevance of these lessons to their lives.