freddiew midterm

Abstract:

Short internet videos are a new, wildly popular, emergent form of entertainment, perfectly suited to the increasingly low attention span culture we now occupy. The sheer volume of viewership and visibility of particularly popular videos opens up a world of yet unexplored possibilities in both the commercial as well as the creative realm. The fact that many memes from viral web videos have successfully migrated from internet culture to popular culture indicates that this form of entertainment is by no means confined to the boundaries of electronic medium. As of now, there have been no prominent traditionally scholarly analysis of this new form of entertainment, perhaps owing to the difficulty in writing about a primarily visual, constantly moving medium. It is a topic uniquely suited to a multimedia based scholarly approach.

I am attempting to deconstruct the elements that comprise viral videos that achieve a degree of internet notoriety and popularity. In doing so, I hope to help my reader understand how the average web user views, processes, and in turn propagates video media that he or she encounters. My assumption behind this project is that the internet audience is, contrary to popular belief, predictable, and while trends and general tastes are certainly mercurial, there exist common elements that are in fact shared by self-created and self-propagated media.

I will distill a number of theoretical "formulas" for popular internet videos from shared elements found in popular internet videos. The core of my project would be to then test the actual effectiveness of my formulas by applying it to a number of self-created videos and tracking their popularity. As there is often an author/viewer correspondance present in these videos, I will also fabricate and assume the various personas behind each video, responding to the viewers. In this way, this might be considered an interactive video project, or more specifically, a series of short interactive video projects linked by a common thread.

While my audience is also an unwitting test subject, the real audience for this would be for the more academically minded, as they are aware of the fact that these videos are constructed with the sole purpose of achieving a high degree of internet popularity, and are also privy to the thought processes behind them.

I intend for my final delivery format to be a website documenting my thinking and process, as well as containing the various videos themselves.

Methodology:

To answer what makes an internet video popular, I will analyze commonly seen elements in popular videos, past and present, and distill them into generic formulas which I will then use as a blueprint to create videos of my own. Meanwhile, I will also document the making of process to yield insight into the thinking behind each decision. I intend to use the web video format as the primary way of presenting information, and necessarily will be also creating a webpage for the project as well.

Media Presentation and Justification:

I will be using the web video form with website to present this project. In this way, the form of the project will reflect the actual content. The personas created for each video too will interact through the medium of the video sharing websites.