Julian Smith CS
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Fabrizio Cilento What Julian Smith Hates (and Loves) About Facebook: Social Media Parody As Self-Promotion YouTube is the third most trafficked site on the Internet, after Google and Facebook. Each month over one billion unique users watch six billion hours of video, with one hundred hours of video being uploaded every minute. The YouTube Partner Program launched in 2007 has allowed more than a million creators to earn money from their YouTube videos, with the result that the number of people subscribing daily has more than tripled in the last year.1 As a consequence of this exponential acceleration of production and consumption, the modality through which users experience humor online has transformed, creating a scene of young comedians who are especially skilled in circulating their own content. Through the case study of humorist Julian Smith, this essay investigates what makes YouTube comedians/entrepreneurs successful. In order to understand and critique the channel juliansmith87 and its connections to various social media platforms, I adopt two strategies. On one hand, I focus on a specific video from the channel called 25 Things I Hate About Facebook; on the other I discuss the channel on a macro-level, looking at it from inception to current state. While 25 Things has not achieved the viral success of other videos by Smith,2 it created an aesthetic formula characterized by two elements: a self-reflexive approach to digital media and a high production value. Today Smith’s channel has an average of two and a half million views per video, with peaks of thirteen million, and his visual style has become widely imitated. Why are so many users following his work? How did these videos go viral? Once a video goes viral, how does the comedian manage to maintain its privileged status? How Cilento 2 did Smith manage to beat the competition of other users aiming to reach the same visibility? How does he take advantage of our current digital environment and “convergence culture”?3 At some level, the “phenomenon” of Julian Smith is a product of the proliferation of the inexpensive technologies and sharing platforms that allowed him to capture moving images and distribute them. However, this answer relies on a sort of technological determinism that tends to diminish the talent and the human agency behind You Tube comedy channels. Contrary to what cultural pessimists such as Andrew Keen and Nicholas Carr argued in the early days of YouTube, the most successful content producers are not rank amateurs with any particular talents.4 In order to understand contemporary humor online, one needs to move beyond thinking of You Tubers as trivializing comedy and contemporary pop culture. Going behind the scenes of Smith’s work allows me to deliver a first-hand look at creating comedy videos for the Internet and making a full-time career out of it. Generally presented in a three to five minute format, Smith’s videos are professionally produced with the most updated digital cameras and editing software and then shared online via pervasive media marketing strategies. Smith proves that YouTube is both a site for personal use (summarized by its tagline “Broadcast Yourself”) and a platform for the shared artistic visions of comedy entrepreneurs.5 This community is represented by channels such as HISHE (How it Should Have Ended) and Screen Junkies, which respectively propose animated alternate endings to Hollywood films and the so-called “Honest Trailers,” and Epic Meal Time, whose work enters in the belly of television cooking shows and supersizes them. The new wave of online humorists switched from virtual to real when young comedians/entrepreneurs started collaborating and creating short clips together. Smith’s collaborations and productions Cilento 3 include those with Rhett and Link, Ray William Johnson and Smosh (the tenth and fourth most subscribed channels on YouTube, respectively), Joe Hanson (the father of Current TV), and the ‘lifecaster’ iJustine (one of the most subscribed female personalities on YouTube). YouTube comedians/entrepreneurs approach social media and digital platforms with precise commercial strategies, and often crisscross into each other in order to establish artistic and promotional connections. Thus, my study also provides an initial map of some comedy content creators that possess characteristics similar to those of juliansmith87 and evaluate their role in the modernization of digital humor. From Vernacular Creativity to Online Entrepreneurship 25 Things I Hate About Facebook, the social network parody launched in 2009 by Smith, was his first video to go viral. It currently has seven and a half million views on YouTube. This is the video that transformed its author from an everyday YouTube user to a full-time comedian/entrepreneur and a point of reference for other Internet artists. Smith identified vernacular creativity as the language of YouTube, but aimed to evolve it in a distinctive visual style. In addition, the specific generational target and Smith’s distinguished understanding of social network dynamics made 25 Things unique when compared to similar uploads by other comedians. This is a piece of humor delivered online by a young adult who wanted to be seen protesting digital technology via digital technology. In 25 Things Julian Smith puts on scene the frustrations shared by Facebook users due to the constant shifting of the social network’s settings. These include a variety of items, from ‘poking’ to difficulties encountered in real-time chats. Today, certain Cilento 4 Facebook settings have become an integral part of our everyday life while others have disappeared, but Smith’s video remains a document of the estrangement and the frustrations users experienced in the early days of the social network. In order to address the awkwardness of the commonplace interruptions during a Facebook chat, Smith places two college students face-to-face. One person begins to speak but promptly stops as soon as he sees the other begin, creating a stagnant effect. The tableau vivant goes further when Smith places Facebook chat images over the pair’s heads as they communicate. One still relevant issue that Smith engages with in 25 Things is the invasion of older people on the platform. It is well known that Facebook was originally targeted to Harvard University students who wished to network with one another.6 As time went on, the network began signing up different demographic groups, including parents, grandparents and, at the other extreme, younger teenagers. The difficult coexistence of “digital natives” and “digital immigrants” (Prensky, 1-6) interacting on the same platform continues to be a commonly held concern with Facebook, which has experienced a slight decline in popularity and hipness since “mom” and “dad” opened their profiles, monitoring and at times awkwardly interacting with their kids and other relatives by over-sharing. As a result, teenagers are becoming less active on Facebook and have migrated to other social platforms such as Instagram, Twitter, and Tumblr to upload more intimate or provocative content.7 Smith’s successful choice was to engage with the familiar subject of how Facebook controls our digital identities with its infamous ‘peer- to-peer privacy violation.’ Smith represented the subconscious of the Millennial generation by showing how social media revolutionized traditional forms of Cilento 5 communication. The topic had a vast ready-made audience, and it resulted in a significant gain of subscriptions to juliansmith87. What Social Media Means to Smith (and Vice Versa) Within a year, Smith’s satire had reached nearly two million views, and Smith was invited to film the first Facebook digital short ever produced, Inside the New Facebook Layout. Mark Zuckerberg recognized that Smith’s affectionate criticism did not present an antagonist to his cultural politics,8 but instead found ways to integrate it into his business. Thanks in part to the spontaneous feedback, Facebook made modifications to many of the 25 Things Smith hated. For example, notifications from games and apps can now be hidden, eliminating the frustration of game and “Compare Your Friends” requests. Facebook has negotiated privacy issues on multiple occasions over the years. The company’s fluidity and immediate reaction is a demonstration of how the digital media field is difficult to represent and to parody, a dynamic that reinforces the value of Smith’s work. Smith’s humor will continue to be funny years from now, because it represents a sort of collective “how we were,” and a litmus paper of how we have evolved in increasingly communicating with our peers, relatives, and colleagues via posthuman and hyperreal profiles. 9 The ironic aspect of 25 Things is that, like many Millennials, Smith is reliant on social networks to succeed as a multimedia entrepreneur. The YouTube description of his videos reads “Like me on Facebook” with a link to his account. At the end of each of video, he includes information for both his Facebook page and Twitter account (he has currently reached 402,000 likes and 136,000 followers). Throughout his career, Smith Cilento 6 has used social media to both promote himself and establish an intimate connection with fans that would be unthinkable for previous generations of comedians. Smith frequently uploads and posts pictures from upcoming videos and advertises for open acting positions while also giving fans a glimpse into his personal life through a calculated spontaneity. Looking at his social network activity, one can learn that he and his wife Sarah (who has an active blog called The One in Pink) met via Facebook and moved to Los Angeles. They have a daughter, Nora, two cats, Scout and Pepper, and a black Labrador named Frank. Like many Facebook users, Smith posts pictures and comments about food (“Three burgers in two days. Take that, body”; or “Currently binging on Wonderful Sweet Chili pistachios.