Teenage "Drama" on Twitter

In The Drama! Teen Conflict, Gossip, and Bullying in Networked Publics, Alice Marwick and danah boyd explore the distinction between bullying and “’drama”.  According to Marwick and boyd, teenagers prefer the term “drama” because it allows them to frame their social conflicts without acknowledging the perpetrator/victim dynamic that is included in the definition of bullying.  This enables teens to protect themselves from the social and psychological harm that may potentially result from accounting for the hurt that they are either feeling or causing others to feel.  Teenagers ultimately wish to be seen as mature individuals, and by rejecting terms like “bullying” which imply childishness and immaturity and replacing them with their own terms such as “drama”, they may feel empowered and in control of their own narrative.  In addition, drama functions as an investment in status for many teenagers, as they organize their social structure through the use of information as social capital.  Having recently witnessed an online bullying situation, I would say that I definitely agree with many of the characteristics of “drama” that Marwick and boyd have outlined.

As a teenager, I was fortunate enough to avoid the majority of the drama floating around my high school and social group.  However, I have still experienced typical teenage drama through situations experienced by my 16-year-old cousin.  Several months ago, my cousin made the decision to end two long friendships, as she had grown increasingly uncomfortable with her friends’ disrespect for her parents and classmates.  Unfortunately, these teenagers’ disrespect and hatred was then redirected toward my cousin.  Rather than quietly accepting that they had drifted apart, my cousin’s former friends took to Twitter and spent the next several months of her life publishing a steady stream of rumors and vicious remarks about my cousin.  My cousin has never publicly addressed the conflict and was never anything but a loyal friend toward these two people, yet their posting against her on Twitter, which began in February and is still continuing, has included accusations of everything from turning people against them to stealing their ex-boyfriends.

 

The preference for the term “drama” is clearly visible in the example below; and when one onlooker attempted to step in, these individuals immediately switched the terminology from “bullying” to “drama”.  My cousin’s former friends feel comfortable and entitled to continue their written assault because drama is seen by teenagers as something that is to be risen above rather than something rude, painful, and damaging.  The issue of the immaturity implied by bullying claims is also clear, and these two people, though acting in an undeniably childish manner, were quick to reinforce each other’s ‘adult’ attitudes after being accused of bullying.

 

  

The performance element of drama is also an obvious factor in this situation.  These individuals show a sense of awareness that it is difficult to distinguish between truth and lies on the internet, and they use this fact to suggest to others that they have information about my cousin that could help them climb the teenage social ladder.  Because the truth isn’t something that would attract an audience, these teens work to alter their social media reality and make the conflict more interesting to onlookers.

 

Captured by Google Earth

                 In The Googlization of Us, Siva Vaidhyanathan explores the capability of Google services to enable a new level of surveillance.  Google Street View and Google Earth, for example, allow the user to take a visual tour of practically any location.  As this area of Google emerged, “many commentators declared the service to be too invasive for comfort”, as users are able to easily view other people’s streets and homes.  While the service may be useful in certain situations, such as examining architecture or finding local landmarks, Vaidhyanathan reminds us that it is practical to remain wary of this new method of surveillance.   Features such as Google Earth and Google Street View have raised a number of concerns about privacy and surveillance, including the issues of trespassing, lack of notification, and disclosure of private information.

                While examining this article and considering the debates that have resulted from the emergence of Google Earth and Google Street View, I immediately recalled an experience from my past summer of work.  Over the summer, I work as a farm technician and help carry out a variety of confidential agricultural field trials.  When I returned to work this past summer, my coworkers told me that they had looked for the facility on Google Earth and had actually managed to find the vehicle and field setup that we had been using to collect data at an earlier date.  My coworkers were astounded by this discovery and even found it somewhat funny that we had been captured by the Google camera, but I couldn’t help but feel a bit disturbed.  Despite the absolute quiet and apparent isolation of the area of the farm that I had been working in, Google had somehow managed to capture my vehicle and equipment on camera without being noticed in any way.

                Prior to my own experience being captured on Google’s cameras, I didn’t give a second thought to these potentially invasive Google features.   Vaidhyanathan mentions in that “Google users became accustomed to the new function”, and this was definitely true for me.  However, my views definitely shifted when my activity was captured without my knowledge or permission, and I would say that I now completely agree with Vaidhyanathan’s warning to be wary of such ‘Googlization’.  I also appreciated that his writing also explored several important debates initiated by Google’s invasive mapping technologies.  The concept of Google ‘trespassing’ with its lenses was intriguing to me, and I can empathize with the concerns of the couple who accused Google of this.  I was alarmed by the fact that a Google camera had made its way into my work facility completely undetected and taken information to broadcast publicly.  Personally, I don’t believe that Google has any more right than a trespassing individual does to photograph private property.  I also appreciated the concerns that Vaidhyanathan discussed regarding anxiety about disclosure of private information.  The work that my company does is often confidential, and it is troubling that Google is free to access imagery of what we do at any time they choose.  While Google Earth doesn’t currently come close enough to reveal specifics about our experimental trials, it could definitely become even more of a threat as their technology becomes more refined, and it will be up to our facility to step in and request removal of the imagery.

Free Enterprise & Piracy in the Music Industry

               In Six Faces of Piracy, Ramon Lobato addresses the issue of piracy by breaking it down into a variety of forms.  One of these six types of piracy is ‘piracy as free enterprise’.  In contrast to the common ‘piracy as theft’ perspective, this free enterprise point of view suggests that piracy caters to market needs and may actually be economically beneficial in some ways.  Although pirated content itself does not generate a direct profit, Lobato suggests that piracy might still be monetized in some form.  As an example, Lobato discusses product placement in movies.  In this case, piracy may be beneficial to a showcased product, as increased circulation of a movie may lead to an increase in the highlighted brand’s value.  While users may not be paying for their pirated content, this pirated content may lead them to purchase other goods at a later time.

                This 2012 BBC News article, A Glimpse at Piracy in the UK and Beyond, seems to be somewhat inclusive of this view on piracy.  While the story includes the harshly negative perspective of a BPI chief executive (“We are losing hundreds of millions of pounds a year that should be getting invested into new music”), it also presents the opinions of the artist.  Ed Sheeran, the most illegally downloaded artist in the UK last year, appears to have a view on piracy that agrees much more with the ‘piracy as free enterprise’ concept.  While 8 million copies of the album have been pirated and only 1.2 million have been legally purchased, Sheeran states that he feels good that 9 million people in the UK have his album, despite the majority being pirated.  He believes that this gives people that wouldn’t necessarily buy the album a chance to listen to his songs, which can create new fans that might come to his performances.  While he may not be profiting from the actual pirated albums, the illegal downloads help build Sheeran’s fan base, eventually leading to an increase in profits from tickets to his performances.

                I can definitely see the logic behind Lobato’s ‘piracy as free enterprise’ discussion.  It does seem as though piracy can lead to economic success in some ways, and I find it encouraging seeing that today’s artists are open to the idea of a changing music industry.  The BBC article states that an emerging business model for the industry “sees the album in a similar way to how it sees the music video: as a promotional tool for the artist, a mechanism to sell live performance tickets.”  This new perspective seems to be aligned with Lobato’s free enterprise concept, as unauthorized circulation of music albums can be used as advertising for concerts in the same way that pirated movies may increase the effects of product placement. 

YouTube Marketing Effectiveness: Oprah vs. Pop Music

In The Entrepreneurial Vlogger: Participatory Culture Beyond the Professional-Amateur Divide, Jean Burgess and Joshua Green explore the characteristics of YouTube culture.  Burgess and Green write that the “real” YouTube had no market-related motivation driving users’ video production, and they argue that the site is most ideal for amateurs and ordinary individuals who seek personal expression.  Burgess and Green further support this concept by including a segment related to Oprah Winfrey’s creation of a YouTube channel.  In contrast to the average user’s personal expression video blogs, Oprah’s YouTube channel was created as a type of promotional strategy, with the intent of presenting the brand to the community in a controlled way.  Due to the channel’s lack of compatibility with many elements of participatory media, Oprah’s channel has ultimately been somewhat of a failure with the YouTube audience.

While the Oprah brand, even with its large level of media power, failed to impress users, some channels seem to have been more successful in marketing their brand via YouTube.  I am particularly interested in how this applies to today’s music industry, as an increasing number of bands seem to be successfully using YouTube as a means to expand their fan base.  In high school, my best friend went to a concert and saw the band We The Kings perform.  She told me all about her experience, stating that the band was somewhat decent, but she probably wouldn’t see them again.  However, at some point after that, she stumbled across the We The Kings YouTube channel.  After seeing the band’s regularly-posted vlogs, she became more appreciative of their music, and she still watches their YouTube videos and goes to their concerts today, five years after her initial concert experience.  She also shares videos from the channel often, bringing more new fans to the band’s YouTube page.   For this and other bands, YouTube appears to be a much more effective marketing tool than it has been for Oprah.

As of today, the Oprah Winfrey Network channel has 82,533 subscribers, while the We The Kings band channel has 86,694.  The Oprah brand, as widely known and powerful as it is, is has achieved less success that this relatively small band has found while marketing themselves to a niche audience on YouTube.  According to the writing of Burgess and Green, this variability in brand success happens for assorted reasons.  In this particular case, I would hypothesize that this is due mainly to the brand’s knowledge of how YouTube operates and the resulting difference in how the audience is addressed.  As the article mentions, Oprah’s channel did not allow unmoderated comments and did not directly address YouTube users.  The videos found on the We The Kings YouTube channel differ significantly because they are of amateur quality and often feature clips of the band’s daily life, as well as members of the band talking directly to the camera.  Also, rather than controlling user comments completely, the band often asks for audience input, encouraging their fans to interact with them.  By marketing themselves in this way, a band can appeal to music fans by giving them an in-depth look at the band members’ personalities and their life on tour, which is ultimately much more effective than professionally produced videos that don’t connect with YouTube users. 

The Cult of the Amateur & Commercial Photography

               In Andrew Keen’s The Cult of the Amateur, Keen accuses the Web 2.0 of enabling hobbyists to triumph over individuals with experience.  Keen discusses this celebration of amateurism specifically as it relates to Wikipedia.  This online encyclopedia allows absolutely anyone to add and edit entries, making it equally simple for both amateurs and professionals to share information publicly.  Keen emphasizes his concerns about this prominent position of the hobbyist, claiming that “by empowering the amateur, we are undermining the authority of the experts”.  In addition, Keen addresses the issue of content pricing, as free amateur content is more appealing than expensive professional content in many cases.  While I don’t feel that these ideas can easily be generalized across every discipline, I would definitely agree that these arguments presented by Andrew Keen in The Cult of the Amateur apply to the current state of the commercial photography industry.

                When the switch was made from film to digital cameras, photography became accessible to more of the general public, as images were visible without being developed by a lab and pictures could now be stored on one’s computer.  As digital cameras shrink in size and in price, this medium becomes increasingly more available, and there are also an increasing number of websites that enable users to publicly share their digital images online.  Being a creative person myself, I do understand the appeal of sharing work online, but I also believe that there are problems that arise due to this.  The specific issue that I would like to address is the creation of “professional” photography pages on Facebook.  Facebook allows any of its users to create their own page, and this has resulted in legions of untrained people with cameras setting up photography pages through which they offer services that are typically covered by trained professionals, such as senior portraits and wedding shoots.  While the difference in image quality is typically visible at a glance, the reality is that many customers are still choosing to hire these amateur photographers.  Some customers may be comforted by the fact that some amateurs have the same cameras and editing software as a professional, but this willingness to hire an amateur is often due mainly to the issue of cost.  Because these amateur photographers are often high school students or working adults using photography as a hobby, they typically have no studio costs to cover and often offer to provide their services either for much less money or for free.  Amateur photographers may also offer a higher quantity of images, often skipping over the proofing process and instead presenting their customers with a disc of every picture taken at the shoot, free of watermarks and with no usage restrictions attached.  

                The impact of social media on the commercial photography industry is similar to the impact of Web 2.0 on the encyclopedia.  The internet provides a space for amateurs to present their knowledge and imagery to the world, and I would argue that, at least in situations dealing with creative media, this most definitely has the potential to undermine the training and expertise of true professionals.  As Andrew Keen asserts while comparing Wikipedia to Encyclopedia Britannica, “fighting against free is hard, if not impossible”.  I have spoken with several professional studio photographers regarding this very issue, and each individual has discussed their increasing struggle to attract customers while maintaining prices that will allow them to make a living.  As is the case with Wikipedia, amateur photography promises to provide a higher quantity of services for a lower cost, and professional institutions have difficulty competing because of this price difference.  

Recently, however, I have noticed an additional trend relating to this online battle of amateur vs. professional photographers.  Professionals have begun to use the very same social media that threatens their businesses to fight back against the influx of amateurs into the realm of commercial photography.  By creating informational images and sharing them with the public, professional studio photographers are working to educate the general public on the differences between amateur and expert work.  These images clearly lay out differences in work, even in cases when an amateur has the same equipment as the professional.  They also work to educate Facebook users about how the cost of their work is calculated and where the money goes.  Personally, I am sympathetic to these efforts, but the ultimate reaction of the public remains to be seen.  The number of amateur photographers offering cheap services is increasing daily, and like Keen, I fear that this empowerment of the amateur will continue to threaten the institutions constructed by trained, experienced professionals.