The majority of the videos I watch are of the people walking around videoing themselves doing random things or just videoing their day.
What would you think if you saw someone walking around with a camera? Talking to the camera. Just walking and talking. Yup. You would have to look twice to make sure the person was actually doing that. You would think the person was crazy.
This blog prompt was assigned because we have been reading Shakespeare and many of the characters in his play Hamlet give soliloquies so that the viewer (or reader) has an insight on what the character is thinking.
Being a blogger on YouTube is an example of a modern day soliloquy. The blogger is speaking to the camera so that the viewer has an insight on what's going on, and what the YouTuber is thinking.
In Hamlet the soliloquies are designed by Shakespeare to make an entire plot make sense. In contrast, the beauty of YouTube is that it is people saying whatever they want to say for a comedic effect.
The genius of Shakespeare is that the characters' seemingly random rantings fit together like puzzle pieces that make the story whole.
The popular YouTubers are friends with each other, are in each others' videos, and as a result their separate soliloquies do hang together in a certain way. YouTube is a puzzle that has pieces with round edges; they fit together like a necklace. Technically they are all one piece of jewelry, however, the beads seem to have been chosen at random, all working for the same purpose but each bead having its own "personality."
In Hamlet there is a single author who is moving all the characters which gives the whole a unified voice. In YouTube, by contrast, the author is a collective whose voice is less coherent and less distinctive.
The genius of Shakespeare is that it is one crazy person- you have to be a little bit crazy to understand the world we live in- standing behind the scenes pulling the strings of all the characters. In YouTube there is no one pulling the strings. The crazy people just say whatever they think. Something of a pattern emerges because of their relations with each other but it is no where near as cohesive as the world of a single author.
I totally didn't even make that connection with the vlogs. You did a really nice job here. I love your closing paragraph, and the title is pretty cool as well...
ReplyDeleteMara I think that this is incredibly creative! I would have never thought about it like that but it make total sense. I like how you used the idea of the youtube videos being linked together and how the soliloquies are also linked together. It actually is really funny to think about people talking to cameras and how normal that seems now a days. Like Alex said I like your tittle :)
ReplyDelete