So obviously I should have written this right after I got back from our class discussion last Wednesday on YouTube… but better late than never I guess.

In class we watched the part of the Anthropological Introduction to YouTube by Michael Wesch of Kansas State University’s Digital Ethnography department.

It was very eye-opening and informative. I knew YouTube was huge and global and very popular, but I had never really thought about just how much.

After watching and discussing Wesch’s video, we talked about the different kinds of “genres” that are present on YouTube.

We split into groups and were told to watch different YouTube videos from the top 10 list, and then to discuss them. My group got the Trololo Man video, which is so bizarre.

I was part of the minority that had never seen it before, and I was pleasantly surprised. It’s this really, really strange like 70s Russian(?) video of a very smiley and jovial man singing, but he’s not actually singing real lyrics because there was some kind of copyright dispute. It makes for a super weird video, which makes for great YouTube viewing, obviously. Our group categorized this under the genre “Unintentional Hilarity,” which after looking at the Google Doc for class, I see it apparently stands alone.

I’ve made some of my own additions to the Google Doc:

• I mentioned Bonjour, Girl! in my last post, Mashups, but it falls under the category of “Redubbed.”
• I decided to add Girl Laughing at Camera Special Effects to “Unintentional Hilarity” because clearly the girl in this video didn’t mean for this to be funny to other people, she’s just enjoying the effects on her own computer, but I can never watch it without cracking up.
• I went ahead and created a new genre for one of my favorite YouTube finds, Kittens Inspired by Kittens. I decided that this fell under something I call “Strange and Adorable Children.” Watch it and you’ll understand.
• I created a category called “Stereotyping” and added the Shit Girls Say video(s) to it. I think most of those “Shit ____s Say” spinoff videos would fall under that category because they’re blanket statements about things that general groups of people would say. Not that Shit Girls Say isn’t almost 100% true, but it is a stereotype. (Sh*t Nobody Says is also pretty good.)