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Video Memes as Profanations: Fegelein's Views on Folklore
The present paper analyses the video parodies of the film “The Downfall” as an exemplary case of digital folklore. We explore who is the ‘folk’ that produces video memes, tracing how the very notion of folk and the boundaries of folkloristics have changed in the last two centuries. The paper focuses also on the problematic distinction between high culture, mass culture and folklore nowadays in order to show that they are governed by the same aesthetics based on variation, intertextuality and transmediation, and on the shared concern about the loss of authenticity. Following Agamben’s notion of profanation, we claim that video memes are one of the few examples of true profanation, experimentation with form and meaning, and destabilization of official discourses, which escapes the pitfalls of property and is done ‘just for the lulz’. In the parodies of Hitler, history is recreated and power is subverted through the naughty, meaningless, playful power of laughter.
The Ideology of Idiocy
Turtles mating; a man in a gorilla suit, banging his head against a fence; a baby dancing samba. These are only few of the most watched “contagious” video clips in Web 2.0 – the utopia of civic participation. In 1992 Karl Bernstein, one of the journalists who uncovered the Watergate affair, wrote a polemical piece on the culture of idiocy. Bernstein criticized the tabloidization of the media, the lack of investigative journalism, and the unprecedented success of “yellow” TV shows (Bernstein 1992). Eighteen years later, with the advent of the video social networks in our life, the idiot culture is coming of age. A coming of age that we ourselves are to be blamed for.
The Age of the “Mediums”
Information from Link to Link, and from Mouth to Mouth
I feel stupid and contagious,
Here we are now: entertain us.
The Bricoleurs
Vbox7, YouTube, Facebook, and even blogs, rarely produce news. As Geert Lovink notes (Lovink, G. 2007), the chances of finding bloggers committed to carrying out independent journalistic research are slim. What online platforms do is emit a thick cloud of impressions around given news and let loose the public opinion. News are extracted from the closed circle of the traditional media and released in the open Internet space. Here, they grow thick with opinions, comments, and interpretations. It is rather telling which news arouses the interest of Internet users. The Facebook cause "Miss Bulgaria 2009 is a crocodile" might turn out to be a lot more exciting for them than the economic crisis. New media are clockwork media. It is never known for certain which news would detonate the public opinion.
The relation traditional – new media may be examined through the strategies – tactics dichotomy offered by Michel de Certeau (Certeau, M. 2002). Newspapers and television constitute the official discourse, the neutral point of view. Internet users creatively consume, use the official messages. In this case these are not necessarily technologies of resistance. Video websites offer a perfect example at hand. There we see the political entering the field of the quotidian, the entertaining, the personal reading. In other words, new media enable us to take the well-known faces out of their institutional context and plug them into self-contrived plots and narrative configurations; to act as bricoleurs at their expense and deal with the available in unexpected ways.
