MDIA 104: Social and Interactive Media – Assignment 2
The interactive affordances on YouTube lead to negative discussion and interactivity, especially when the content creator has a lot of Social Capital. This essay will look into how consumers and producers interact with popular content creators on the website of YouTube and how certain affordances that are provided by the site allow for constructive discussion. However these same affordances can lead to negative interaction and trolling, something that becomes more common when a channel develops a large following of subscribers. Features on YouTube such as the subscription button afford consumers the opportunity to be updated when a certain producer uploads a new video and the comment section affords consumers of uploaded content to leave a message below the video, aimed at the producer and/or other consumers. These comments can be voted on by other viewers with the most popular comments being propelled higher up the comment section. The producer has the chance to also pin certain comments so they appear at the top of the comments section.
For this essay I have chosen to examine three channels, all run by the same individual. Anthony Fantano is most recognisable from his channel The Needle Drop where he reviews newly released music from a multitude of genres in a way of sharing his thoughts to other consumers interested in the latest releases. While these reviews are not 100% formally produced, one of his secondary channels Fantano offers a more personal insight into certain issues based around music and other popular culture news. Videos on the Fantano channel are not professionally recorded or edited, as well as not relying heavily on scripts as opposed to The Needle Drop where scripts are written for all videos uploaded to this channel, recording quality is much higher as recording is done with a professional camera instead of a web cam. Fantano’s other channel That Is The Plan is incomparable to either The Needle Drop or Fantano in terms of professionalism, with the majority of videos taking a sarcastic approach to non-serious issues and large focus being on ridiculously over-edited videos or mocking certain individuals or groups of people.
Anthony Fantano: Self Proclaimed Best Teeth In The Game.
From Fantano’s three channels he currently has a following of approximately 1.7 million subscribers across his 3 channels (Social Blade), a following large enough to draw in viewers that may intentionally or unintentionally be looking to cause a discourse in the comment sections of videos that Anthony Fantano chooses to upload. With The Needle Drop being Fantano’s most popular channel by a substantial margin it becomes the most vulnerable for the comment section. The societal norms of YouTube as a platform often are based around what is deemed acceptable across numerous other social media platforms as well as how society interacts in real life. Through the feature of subscribing to a content creator’s channel the users of YouTube are afforded the opportunity to be notified when said content creator uploads a new video, it can also afford the content creator to be given more attention as the algorithms of the website recognise their popularity and are able to expose more popular content creators and channels to new users of the website, and existing users that are unaware of channels they are not subscribed to. Users have the option to unsubscribe if they become uninterested in the content the channel uploads. Social norms of YouTube can be broken with the subscription feature as certain people may take the opportunity and affordance of being notified of when a content creator uploads a new video as a means of co-opting the features provided by the website to create discourse among the comment sections of videos. This may be due to the viewer being unhappy with another channel’s content or the user purposely looking to troll for reasons of enjoyment. These problems are starting to overcome initial social norms set by the website as they seek to draw out and multiply interaction or reaction and extract responses (McCosker 215). Although myself not a viewer since the channels inception, going back to watch older reviews means you can see a clear distinction in the quality of comments left under the videos Anthony Fantano has uploaded. This is an issue that he has addressed himself in a video that analyses the comment section of a recent video (fantano 1 Aug) as he is well aware of the nature of these comment sections. One must wonder where this issue begins however.
The Needle Drop channel description vs. That Is The Plan channel description.
This is where we take a look at the meme culture that surrounds Fantano’s channels, most specifically That Is The Plan. Many memes have come from Fantano’s growing success. Some may originate from the board /mu/ hosted on 4chan, such as memes surrounding some artists who have consistently had highly ranked albums by Fantano, such as Death Grips, Swans and Kendrick Lamar as well as albums that have claimed meme status due to notorious reviews such as Kid Cudi’s Speedin’ Bullet 2 Heaven and Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. Many memes however have originated from Fantano’s music reviews as he mentions himself (thatistheplan 20 July), such as calling himself a melon, the ‘best teeth in the fuckin’ game’ or altering his name for comedic effect e.g. Memethony Memetano, Thomthony Yorketano, Nasally Falsetto. Certain memes however are pushed more by the viewers including “real n***as check the score then dip” or “you gave ___ a 7 but ___ a 10??” with these memes themselves becoming ‘meta’ where they mock the original comments that would mention something resembling these in a genuine and serious manner. The channel That Is The Plan furthers the idea that satirical remixing may be regarded as a new form of participation (da Silva & Garcia 109) and it creates a separate set of online societal norms that occur on Fantano’s other channels. As the nature of the channel’s content is very light-hearted so is the comment section, with nothing serious to discuss the comment section is free to run wild with memes and other forms of ‘shitposting’. While it would be ideal to keep this contained to That Is The Plan such a large majority of viewers are also subscribed to both The Needle Drop and Fantano, meaning it is likely comments of this nature can leak to these channels that are more professionally run and upset the social norms that have been set and over time the perceived social norms, which are what the user believes the social norms of a website are (Carpenter and Amaravadi 3), become widely believed my many new subscribers to Anthony Fantano’s channels. It is important when considering the changes in how channels run by Fantano interact in their comment sections to factor in the change that Google made to how comment sections on YouTube videos were formatted. Before the implementation of a proper upvote/downvote system in late 2013, comments sections of the most popular content creators such as Smosh and Ray William Johnson were filled with numerous amounts of spam comments (Dredge). If The Needle Drop was as popular in 2013 as it is now it may have been easier to see a comments section lacking proper and constructive discussion, but funnily enough Google’s changes occurred around a similar time as perceived norms on Fantano’s channels changed, meaning less serious and meme focused discussion would remain relevant as other consumers also agreed with these comments and allowed discussion to devolve.
In conclusion, this essay argued that the interactive affordances on YouTube lead to negative discussion and interactivity, especially when the content creator has a lot of Social Capital. This thesis has been backed up by producing evidence of ongoing social norms that appear on the social media platform of YouTube through the channels The Needle Drop, Fantano and That Is The Plan. Through the channels The Needle Drop and Fantano we see how large amounts of social capital for Anthony Fantano on YouTube impacts interactions between consumers and content creators, as well as consumers with other consumers. As the number of regular viewers increases we also see a change in the trend of what is contained in the comment section, with older videos showing more civil discussion about music that Fantano has reviewed in the relevant video and videos since rising to a considerable amount of popularity consisting of comments that revolve around certain memes, deconstructive arguing and more ‘shitposting’. This translated over to his recently created channel Fantano where comments of the same variety as on The Needle Drop are occurring, without going through the phase of normal and civilised discussion. This essay however examined That Is The Plan in a different manner as the content uploaded on the channel is wildly different and less professional in comparison to any of Fantano’s other two channels. What comes with this is different social norms. This essay theorises that the norms created by the content uploaded on That Is The Plan leaks into Fantano’s other channels due to its sarcastic nature and focus on memes. Resulting in the possibility of being another factor in the change in nature of what is considered normal on The Needle Drop and Fantano.
“Are My Comments Cancerous?” YouTube, uploaded by fantano, 1 Aug. 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I0FDEaSH0kQ. Accessed 28 Sept. 2017.
Carpenter, Christopher J., and Chandra S. Amaravadi. “A Big Data Approach to Assessing the Impact of Social Norms: Reporting Ones Exercise to a Social Media Audience.” Communication Research, 5 July 2016, http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0093650216657776. Accessed 1 Oct. 2017.
Da Silva, Patricia Dias, and José Luis Garcia. “YouTubers as satirists: Humour and remix in online video.” eJournal of eDemocracy & Open Government, vol. 4, no. 1, 2012, pp. 89–114., http://jedem.org/index.php/jedem/article/view/95. Accessed 1 Oct. 2017.
Dredge, Stuart. “YouTube aims to tame the trolls with changes to its comments section” The Guardian, 7 Nov. 2013, http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/nov/07/youtube-comments-trolls-moderation-google. Accessed 2 Oct. 2017.
"fantano – User Profile." YouTube, created 18 May 2017, https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnxQ8o9RpqxGF2oLHcCn9VQ/. Accessed 20 Sept. 2017.
“Featured Box for theneedledrop.” Social Blade, http://socialblade.com/youtube/user/theneedledrop/otherchans/sbrank. Accessed 1 Oct. 2017.
McCosker, Anthony. “Trolling as provocation: YouTube’s agonistic publics.” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, vol. 20, no. 2, Dec. 2013, pp. 201–217., http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1354856513501413. Accessed 2 Oct. 2017.
"thatistheplan – User Profile." YouTube, created 9 Sept. 2007, https://www.youtube.com/user/thatistheplan. Accessed 20 Sept. 2017.
"theneedledrop – User Profile." YouTube, created 20 Jan. 2009, https://www.youtube.com/user/theneedledrop. Accessed 20 Sept. 2017.
“TOP 10 FANTANO MEMES” YouTube, uploaded by thatistheplan, 20 July 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkHre04K4TM. Accessed 27 Sept. 2017.