Hey,
so on Twitter today
Hank Green posted
“Think pieces psychoanalyzing folks based on their social media presence
is unscientific crap and made entirely of conformation bias.”
Basically I responded by saying:
What if a think piece sort of analyzing a social media persona
is framed as literary criticism rather than psychoanalysis,
like based on reading rather than diagnosis?
If we understand parasocial interaction, we can separate a person from a persona.
You look at an image of a person and you just see the image, not the person.
So therefore,
you can read...
an image of a person like you read a book.
Right? Maybe, right? maybe?
I don't know. I don't know.
But this is sort of one of the ideas that I've been
relying on
for this whole, like, developing
vlog studies, vlog therory.
That you should be able to go into someone's channel,
watch those videos, and receive the narrative
and...
understand what it signifies, and critique it as you would a book,
and treat it as seriously as a text,
as like a...
as a movie or a poem
or any of these things.
And there's a couple perspectives that sort of informs the way that I think about that.
One of them...
By the way, this is my YouTube Research binder.
One of them is...
Neal Gabler.
So, Neal Gabler...
has this article
called
“Toward a New Definition of Celebrity.”
And what he says is that...
He draws...
a line
between famous people and celebrities.
He says that famous people...
they just have a name.
Celebrities have a story.
So it's not just enough for someone to know your name for you to be a celebrity,
it's that people must also know your story.
He calls it “life narrative” or
“Celebrity is an art form wrought in the medium of life.”
He says,
“In fact, celebrity narratives are now so exciting and inventive
that fictional narrative has a hard time competing with them.”
So...
One way to...
maybe frame that statement is like...
like about someone...
like people like the Kardashians, right?
They...
We don't know them as people. We don't know them.
We only know them through these stories and these images we receive of them.
So we can't really judge them.
Like, I hesitate to judge them as humans beings.
But...
I have a certain level of comfort, I think, with judging their public
behavior
as it is narrativized through
TMZ and Access Hollywood and
and these sorts of
celebrity narrative
generation machines, you know?
People Magazine. My mom, when I was growing up, she read a lot of People Magazine
and she knew these stories.
And she had opinions about them,
not...
because she would even interact with any of those people, but because...
those stories are in conversation all the time
with your sense of morality, your place
your situated place in culture.
And I think that there's sort of a parallel in this to
to Greek myth.
In Ancient Greece, right, there's all these myths.
And like, those myths weren't just stories about
people that were made up.
Right? Like...
They are made up stories.
But they contain cultural information, right?
They're morality tales,
they have insights into what the Greeks thought about, like
relationships, and the family.
There's information to be
learned from those myths other than the plot itself.
That works kind of the same way as, like, current celebrity works, right?
Like, that art form of mythic storytelling
has a lot of parallels to how we tell stories today.
So, my thing is, like...
what...
what from that understanding of celebrity narrative,
of myth, of like the way that
stories function in culture
can we apply to the vlog, if any.
If vlogs contain images of personae, of “celebrities,” of narrativized lives,
can we read them and judge them like we do
traditional celebrities?
Should we judge traditional celebrities?
Maybe...
Like, I feel like some people are like:
“Okay, we should just leave celebrities alone. Just don't do anything with them.”
Nonetheless, I think celebrity is like...
Maybe not a cultural institution, but a phenomenon, a thing that happens.
It's like part of our culture, and maybe we should just like...
take it as it is?
Maybe we should just, like,
acknowledge that there are some people whose lives
are narrativized and
we should read them as texts.
Explain to me why it's a bad idea?
That... I don't know.
Tell me why, genuinely, because I'm struggling with this a little bit.
The thing that makes this really difficult and complicated
is that the persona
and the person
are entangled in a way that we can't really...
describe yet.
Or at least I have a lot of trouble describing
because, like,  I'm...
When I put myself out there
on this channel it's like
that's...
I know that's me.
Like, I have made this decision to represent myself this way.
It's not... This isn't all of me, right?
But it is some of me.
And I don't know where...
or to what extent you can...
I don't know how you can separate this image and this persona,
but it's so,
or the persona and the person,
but it's so fundamental to the way that I...
view YouTube,
and have started to think, like, that's...
Parasocial interaction is so...
I'm always talking about it because it's so fundamental to the way I see YouTube.
I hope I've... I hope I've made myself clear.
I'm just like, this is a really challenging...
idea for me, and I'd love to hear your guys' thoughts about it.
Thanks, see ya.
