The Converging of Cultures: MTV & YouTube (Part 3)
Kyle Bylin, Associate Editor
Context Collapse
In some cases, sharing the ‘same stage’ refers to the medium, but for others, their stage consists of playing music in their bedroom and recording it with a webcam. What effect then may this have on our perception of the captured performance that seems to assimilate authenticity? Is it the context of seeing the performer play in their bedroom? Or, is it lack of the context, because neither of us is in the same room? In a way, the portal that the video creates leads us to believe that they are performing for us.
So to speak then, as Professor Mike Wesch believes, “The problem is not lack of context. It is context collapse.” Defined as, “an infinite number of contexts collapsing upon one another into that single moment of recording. The images, actions, and words captured by the lens at any moment can be transported to anywhere on the planet and preserved (the performer must assume) for all time. The little glass lens becomes the gateway to a black hole sucking all of time and space – virtually all possible contexts – in upon itself.”
He explains further, “In face-to-face communication events we carefully assess the context of the interaction in order to decide how we will act, what we will say, and how we might try to construct and present ourselves.”
“Now look carefully at a webcam.” Mike instructs, “That’s there. That’s somewhere else. That’s everybody. On the other side of that little glass lens is almost everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you have ever heard of, and even those you have never heard of. In more specific terms, it is everyone who has or will have access to the internet – billions of potential viewers, and your future self among them.” This effect, this ‘so-called stage,’ he explains, “Some have called it at once the biggest and the smallest stage – the most public space in the world, entered from the privacy of our own homes.”
Conclusion
However, why do we do it and why is it ‘authentic?’ As individuals, we do it just because we can. In turn, when we do perform on that stage, we tend to show the little bit of ourselves that we may not expose to the rest of the world. Because, “Through it we can reach out to a next door neighbor or across the world … to people we love, people we want to love, or people we don’t even know.” Why, Mike believes, “to share something deep or something trivial, something serious or something funny, to strive for fame or to simply connect.”
That is, in a sense why a grass roots video is authentic. Those who make them want to share something and connect with people, but mainly as it appears, they want to connect with you. This effect interests me in correlation with Bo Burnham, because there he is ‘in there.’ Yet really, he is somewhere out there singing a song called, “My Whole Family Thinks I’m Gay.” Leaving no doubt, despite its comedic and satire delivery, that this is something, he deals with in his life and his desire to connect is authentic.
With Avril Lavigne and Burnham, sharing the same stage to perform, what we are seeing is a converging of cultures whose content came from opposite ends of the media spectrum. “Whatever its motivations,” Jenkins believes that convergence is, “changing the ways in which [The Music Industries] operate and the ways average people think about their relation to [music.]” The participatory culture of YouTube took music fans from voting and hoping that MTV played a video to an environment where they engaged and created content themselves.
This generation of digital natives does not know a world without the technology that has made every aspect of popular music accessible to them. Everything, from its creation to production, distribution to promotion, and consumption, sits at their fingertips, waiting for trial, error, and experimentation. Building upon Jenkins later remark, “[Music fans] are just learning how to exercise that power—individually and collectively—and [The Music Industry is] still fighting to define the terms under which [they, the fans] will be allowed to participate.”
