Back, with Adaptations

Hi There. Long time no text-based communication.

For those of you who keep up with YouTube, you may have noticed that my last post (in January!) coincided with a teeny tiny little change to the YouTube interface. Namely, in the eponymous "Recommended for You" section, each video suddenly came with a new line, titled Because You Watched, followed by a video.

That's right -- all my inquiries were instantly demystified. Remember when I thought Celine Dion's "Beauty and the Beast" was recommended because I'd been watching both Disney and the Diva herself? Well, I was giving YouTube too much credit; each recommendation, I learned in January, is merely a direct result of one other video you watched. Not even one other video you "liked," or "favorited." I'll be honest, I was dramatically disappointed.

Recently, however, I started to notice that the little feature that seemed directly aimed at rendering my blog obsolete actually came with its own interesting quirks. Sometimes, the "transparent" Because You Watched line was even more perplexing than nothing at all.

Take, for example, today's recommendation:



In the blog of the past, I might have noted how many makeup tutorials I have watched over the years. Not because I ever intended to follow one -- especially one as grotesque as this -- but because it's fascinating to watch someone's DIY transformation without any cutaways like you'd see on TV. We get to see every single difficult step. Very cool.

But oh no. That's not why this was recommended. This was recommended, it turns out, because I watched "Get Outta Town," a short comedy sketch by a favorite YouTuber of mine named DisneyKid1. Relation? None that I can tell. Well, take that back -- I think both users are gay, so there is that.

Is YouTube sexual orientation profiling? Recommending a gay user's makeup tutorial because I enjoyed a gay user's comic sketch? Or is the Because You Watched line just an admission of how random the algorithm has always been?

One thing's for sure: I'm back, and I intend to find out.

Bang bang!

Cute:



Contextualization:

I watch a lot of YouTube sketch comedy. Usually a group of high-school- or college-age kids (what we call Y/A in the book bizz), usually with a home video camera and basic editing software, usually making videos that heighten the drama of random, everyday experiences. Sometimes very funny.

Think Smosh, FND Films, and Derrick Comedy. Or, you might already know JacksFilms, the comedians behind tonight's recommendation, from their "WTF Blanket" Snuggie parody fame.

I think what makes comedy groups like this so popular, besides the obvious fact that they're humorous, is that they seem to be made by the kids next door except ten times cooler. The stars all have that gangly, geeky charm, and they make you think that these videos aren't the products of hours sitting around the writing table, but of a typically random afternoon with a video camera.

And now, it's like you're hanging out with them, holding the camera. You're in on the joke. It's a difficult aesthetic to fake with a higher budget and producers, though I might argue that Andy Samberg has made a career out of just that.

This particular recommendation isn't one of the funniest - or even one of the funnier - examples of this kind of video, but it's cute, and it captures that almost voyeuristic appeal I'm describing. Apart from having watched a few of JacksFilms' other videos a while ago, I have recently been watching some less polished attempts at this kind of humor, which is, I think, why this was recommended now.

Old News, New Trends

It should not come as a surprise to you to learn that Brittany Murphy died almost a month ago now. It was a bizarre turn of events for which we still do not quite have closure. Once the final autopsy reports are released, we'll either have the flash-in-the-pan scandal many have been expecting, or else we'll have the quiet reminder of our own fragile mortalities.

Anyway.

I loved Brittany Murphy. Between her endearing portrayal of Tai in Clueless and her downright wacky night on SNL, I saw her as an actress with charm and a slight counterculture edge, and it's easy to gloss over her string of rather nondescript roles now.

So, like many others, on the day that she died I went straight to YouTube to look up the famous "rolling with the homies" clip. Then I looked for but did not find her "Leather Store" skit on SNL. Ah, well.

Since then, I've had at least one recommendation every night in the vein of the following video:



Not much to say here. It takes this girl a whole minute just to say that Brittany Murphy died, but she is one of many vloggers just like her who recorded entire videos just to say that this had happened. As this girl notes in response to negative comments, she was just trying to report the breaking news.

This kind of hive-mind-journalism is an increasingly popular way of disseminating news. I, myself, learned of Brittany Murphy's death from the swarm of facebook status updates it caused. And just look at this video, which received over 16,000 views for a user whose other videos average in the five- to six-hundred range. We want to see what other people are saying, even if we have no idea who they are or what their authorities are. Unlike those boring newscasters on TV, we might even find someone just like us, putting into words what we were feeling but couldn't articulate about the breaking news in question.

On the other hand, we could find lots of false information. I can think of a few Twilight rumors that sent my sister into panic attacks because one false report led to torrents of personal postings on the internet, which made those rumors look like valid news stories. It's easy to assume there is truth in the numbers.

Anyway.

This was a bad recommendation. Personal reporting is dated instantly, especially the kind like this that offers no information or commentary worth listening to even once. But as a kind of lure into this girl's other videos, I'd say she was well served posting *something* about a popular piece of news. I wish her all the best in her future journalism career...

WTF?! Humor

"Happy Tree Friends," "Salad Fingers," "Charlie the Unicorn" - if you're familiar with any two of these three internet sensations, you can probably guess their connection. That is, they're all examples of deeply twisted humor, from fluffy animals meeting gruesome deaths to a deformed humanoid who "likes rusty spoons."

In my experience, the success of this trend seems to stem from the rampant popularity of the "WTF?!" reaction. Ever since we gave a cute acronym to this expression of utter confusion, we've seemed to attach an inherent humor value to it. "That's so random" is a phrase that now means, "I don't understand that, but it's funny, I guess." You're not quite sure if it's funny, though, or if it's actually just plain disturbing. Or maybe it's not even disturbing, it just doesn't make any sense. That's the inherent, unsettling nature of WTF?! humor.



I don't find this video funny. At all. I guessed all the beats before they happened, and I guessed that they wouldn't be funny when they did. YouTube recommended this because I mistakenly watched a past recommendation about a children's cartoon sun leaping from the TV and stabbing people ("Mr. Happy Face"), and I think that video was recommended because I was watching real children's TV shows which were unintentionally creepy (now THOSE, by the way, are funny).

Still, this video has a five star rating and nearly five million views. A lot of people love this, apparently. What I want to know is, how many people watch this and honestly think it is funny - original, clever, whatever - and how many people watch this and just think, "WTF?! Pretty disturbing, but that makes it funny, I guess."

I have to be honest, I was mesmerized by Salad Fingers the first time I saw it. There was something about its unapologetic creepiness that made it hard to ignore. But I'm so tired of WTF?! humor. I'd rather we progress (revert?) to humor that makes sense.

Watch If You Dare

Don't you hate it when someone forwards you a video, innocuously titled something like "calm car ride" or "watch closely," and it turns out the video is just a cheap scare in the form of a grating banshee or a creepy child?

I know I do.

But alas, I've been forwarded two such videos in the past week, each time in the form of a YouTube link. And so, this appeared in my recommendations this evening:

(Wait for it - wait for it)



Confused? Yes, so was I. I wouldn't have even watched it had I not wanted an example of the above prank for this blog, and for once I was actually disappointed by the lack of a sickly surprise -- the only thing scary about this video is its Alabama setting. It took me twice to even notice the thin wisps of smoke that we are meant to understand comprise a ghost

Wait - I take it back. What's scary about this video is that it's amassed 43,000 views and a four-star rating. Were that many people just relieved when they got to the end with no jolt? Or did that many people buy into the notion that a ghost flits across in the screen in these painfully long thirteen seconds?

I have no idea, but what I do know is that the only merit I find in this recommendation is an ironic love for the muzak and the misspelled video description "at nigth" [sic].

I award you no points, YouTube, and may God have mercy on your lack of a soul.

Are You A Gleek?

Glee, Glee, Glee. What am I ever going to do with you? This is one television show with which I have a very complicated relationship, and as far as I can tell I am not alone in my mixed feelings.

On the one hand, I find the writing to be uneven and shallow. I love twisted humor (perhaps too much), and I can laugh at the occasional stereotype-based caricature as much as the next guy, but I need strongly defined characters to anchor my fictions, and this show just doesn't have them. The "baby drama" isn't interesting, the drawn-out preparation for sectionals grew tiring rather quickly, and the songs often spring up inorganically, as though they were transition effects instead of storytelling devices (e.g., the use of Lily Allen's "Smile").

But oh, those songs are catchy.

That's why I always listen to them on YouTube while I do other things. And you know, I also like a few of the home recordings of friends getting together and performing their own renditions of the Glee choreography - it's an infectious kind of happy when it works. So, after watching enough videos in that vein, I was recommended this:



How interesting that Kurt wasn't originally in the script, since that means the original script didn't feature a gay character, and come on, it's the gayest show on television. In the spirit of full disclosure, I auditioned for my own senior musical with "Mr. Cellophane." Oh dear.

Anyway, I've heard that Glee is going on a long hiatus after this week's episode, and I can only hope that the writers sit down and seriously think about where they're going instead of letting the flimsy conflicts they've already written play themselves out. If this recommendation reveals anything, it's how experimental the whole project has been.

But I'm still hopeful. As they sing (so unforgettably): Don't Stop Believin'.

You Don't Say

Tonight's recommendation features one of those aforementioned popular commercials - the ones that aren't masquerading as fan-made videos. The ones that are just funny.

Not surprisingly, it's pretty sexy. YouTube is a great venue for all those "banned" commercials to go viral as they were intended to do. Good news for all those advertisers who I imagine were conscientiously bating the censors; the hard-won "too-hot-for-TV" label no longer just means the occasional, paradoxical TV special.

What is surprising, though, or least noteworthy, is that YouTube recommended a commercial that's entirely in Spanish: title, description, user, and the commercial itself. Unfortunately, I can't understand any of it.



I Google-translated the two captions. Apparently, this is about "friends having a desire for you," and I'm gathering a secret desire at that, while Sprite represents "things as they are." But without the benefit of the voice-over, I can't quite connect all the dots.

This was recommended because a friend recently reminded me of that hilarious (American) Sprite commercial in which a fictitious soda mascot, a smiling sun, leaps off its bottle to terrorize a family. It was in the same campaign as the 'Splode bungee explosion and the combustible acne cream - some of my favorite commercials of all time. I watched all those that I could find.

The point here is, despite not understanding a word of this recommendation, I'm actually glad to see YouTube recommending international videos. I think YouTube provides a great forum for global communication for obvious reasons, and I think keeping the recommendations section country-specific would be lazy and narrow. Lord knows other countries have been familiar with what's streaming on American TV forever.

So, I'll consider this recommendation a prod in a productive direction. Maybe I'll learn Spanish one day, YouTube, and that's a message I can comprehend.