Do you still remember the time when your parents or teachers told you not to tease or laugh at people when you see someone slipped? Guess what, you can forget about their good-hearted, kind advice. Instead of walking up to help that unfortunate person, you should quickly take your phone or camera out and capture this “precious” moment , then upload it to failblog.org, so that everyone in the world can laugh with you at the same time. Sadly, this has become one of the society’s favorite leisure activities nowadays. Going on to failblog and see how people fail in their lives.
Since the day I knew about failblog, I have become addicted to it. Failblog is a comedic website that highly features pictures and videos of someone failing at something they are supposed to do, and captioned with the words "fail" or "epic fail", but sometimes there are some cases of "wins". The website has videos from advertising fail to a fat person who jumps on a diving board and hit his head fail, somewhat resemble to the show AFV (America’s Favorite Video).
I think that this website has slowly transformed the way people treat these unlucky people. With all the new portable technologies that we have on our hands, we have been placing entertainment over sympathy. Take the fat person diving fail example I gave. Instead of stop recording and help the injured man, the person who is recording rather record the whole incident. If you notice, almost every fail video on failblog will at least replay the “precious” moment in slow motion once more, just in case you missed it. Although failblog has become an entertainment to us, it has slowly changed the perspective on how people in our society treat these unfortunate people.
McLuhan will interpret failblog as a hot medium because it does not require much effort in filling in the details of a moving image. When you watching someone “failing”, all you have to do is watch the video and laugh or go “OUCH!” There isn’t much conscious participation by the reader to extract value.
You bring up a valid point that this is not how people are supposed to act. They are not supposed to enjoy themselves in others' misery but instead offer their assistance. But in this increasingly more connected world, people are now becoming more interested in posting a funny video or picture online for their friends to see, just because they can. I although Failblog is now probably the most popular of such websites and television shows such as candid camera and AFV probably started the trend, sadly there are many other television shows and video clips that feature people getting hurt for others' entertainment. An example of these are the infamous Japanese game show clips found on youtube! It is sad that the broadcasting companies are making money off of people getting hurt.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you that it is a hot medium, and that it plays a negative role in socialization, by encouraging bystanders to capture the moment on their camera, rather then be of help. How did you discovery this site in the first place?
ReplyDeleteI can't believe I haven't heard of this before. I a bit ashamed, but it's hilarious. I wonder if a website like this would be as popular 20 years ago, or if our society has slowly transformed with sites like fmylife and mylifeisaverage. I wonder what the next step after this will be.
ReplyDeleteThis is a wonderful entry! Great observation. Humans feed on misery--we already saw this in news but now we see it in these homemade videos. We live in an age w/out inhibitions: all of us are hungry babies waiting to be satisfied by instantaneous entertainment--disregard of the conscience, morals, ethics that traditional societies try to preach to us.
ReplyDeleteYour connection w/ McLuhan is also insightful. The hot/cold media allows us to categorize the nature of humor too. This is a humor that no longer relies on intelligence and thought, but on instinct and reflex!
Nice job!