Postmodern YouTube Comments
Any medium through which humans convey
information is structured, limited but infinitely malleable.
The limitations of a medium invite
the manufacture of clichés and canonical archetypes – there are novelistic
clichés, painterly clichés and cinematic clichés. There are also key examples
of any given medium that we often take as paradigmatic: other iterations
resemble or subvert them in varying shades.
The development of clichés and the
ossification of a canon lead to an inevitable stage of conscious reflection
upon the qualities of the medium, as witnessed in the birth of modernism and
postmodernism in various art forms throughout the 20th century.
Modernism in painting defined limits as it tested them (flatness, a framed
edge) and postmodernism dismantled them.
This process is evident in media
everywhere, even YouTube comments. YouTube comments are restricted by a
character limit and informed by their given function as brief opinions about a
video; these are some basic limitations that the medium presents.
In its nascent, unreflexive stage
the YouTube comment is representational and serves an external purpose. It is about that video at the top of the page;
it serves to pass judgement on it, highlight aspects of it or question it. Just
as a novel is conceived as a vehicle for narrative and a painting is faithful
to its subject.
Some YouTube users introduce
stylistic variation and begin to develop an oeuvre, with their own brand of
crafted comments that do more than simply make observations about the video.
Medium-as-vehicle is challenged and users start to delight in the possibilities
that the comment board provides.
Micro-genres emerge as memes become
established: variations on the joke about the number of people who disliked a
video (‘X people Y’), ‘I liked the part where…’, ‘First!’, ‘Thumbs up if…’ are
established as jokes with wide applicability – a sort of template that can be
filled out with different content, like restaging Othello in contemporary
America or producing iterations of the Cubist guitar. Badiou suggests all
artworks are manifestations of particular ‘truths’ that are anchored in
different contexts – one story retold, one song replayed or one picture
reworked.
These memes display an awareness of
the medium’s history and an insider’s knowledge of the form. A dialogue is
established that entrenches – and tests – users’ facility with the tool. The
modernist moment arrives with complete reflexivity: not just comments about the content of other comments, but
comments about Comments.
Can we get postmodern comments?
They can possess the requisite irony, they can borrow elements from other media
(with a little creativity) but can they melt existing boundaries between ‘a
YouTube comment’ and something else…?
Keep an eye out for a user
attempting to post recipes, paintings and overtures ‘as comments’, questioning
the role of comments in contemporary society , exploring the tension between
comment and not-comment, inhabiting the liminal zone
in which
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