What
I am drawn to most in Michael Wesch’s lecture “The Machine is (Changing) Us: YouTube and the Politics of Authenticity” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09gR6VPVrpw),
is the idea that he presents that new forms of community create new forms of
self-understanding. Near the end of his lecture, just before his closing
remarks, he says, “What we can do with the new environment is create new types
of conversations” (Wesch 33:01). The new environment he speaks of, of course, is the
social media environment, specifically Youtube.
What
I kept thinking of as I heard Wesch say this was the new types of conversations
emerging through Youtube about disability and disease, and the idea of the new
kind of hero that Wesch also speaks about. That’s not necessarily to lift those
with disability or disease to a heroic level for living with disability, but it
is to examine how the social media environment opens these once marginalized
identities to a much wider community, and I mean community not audience. For the
sake of disclosure, I am a cancer survivor and my daughter was born with a rare
form of dwarfism.
The
heroic part in regards to disease and disability is the way individuals use the
self-awareness aspect to not only build community, but to bring a wider
community into the conversation where once the wider community was more of an
audience. I think most specifically of the viral video by
John Novick titled “Don’t Look Down on Me” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mD_PWU6K514).
Novick is an achondroplastic dwarf, and he tapes a short documentary that shows,
with the help of a hidden camera that he wears under his shirt, what a day is
like from his perspective. What we see is that, because of his short stature,
people feel it is okay to invade his space without his permission and do so
freely. A couple of times he’s told he looks like Zach Roloff from the TLC show Little
People, Big World, though he doesn’t really resemble Zach at all beyond his
short stature. What those instances show is that before the social media
environment, the only context for a wider community, and discussion in that
wider community, has been mainstream media. Therefore, that discussion has been
filtered through the lens of mainstream media, rather than through what Wesch
describes as the self-awareness brought about by the context collapse that occurs when there is a
much narrower gap between the audience and whoever is in front of the camera.
With
this narrower gap then, we end up with very personal experiences like Novick’s
that can open a dialogue about how we treat and view difference rather than
just try to understand the difference by watching as an audience.
That dialogue, prior to social media, might only have been confined to
communities that form within these identities, but not necessary outside the
identities. For example, little people meet with other little people through
Little People of America, an awareness organization. Still, that awareness only
reaches marginally outside the boundaries of the identity, perhaps to friends,
neighbors, and extended family. As of this writing, Novick’s documentary had
reached just over two and a half million viewers from all over the world, and
it is much more than a voyeuristic view of life for little people like Little People, Big World seems to be. It’s
more of an invitation to discuss and understand the identity through dropping the viewer right into Novick's
first-person perspective. More than 3,000 viewers respond to the video, many of the responses are from people who know little about dwarfism, and they seem to at least begin broaching the harsh reality Novick presents. Thus, we see developing a
vision of the new type of conversation Wesch might be alluding to in his
lecture. We see the conversation reaching those outside the boundaries of the
disability identity. It’s in this realm where it might be possible
to affect a kind of change that goes deeper than audience awareness, and it’s
in this realm where we might find the beginning of the “I care. Let’s do
whatever it takes by whatever means necessary” (Wesch 33:24) idea that Wesch hopes this
new social media environment will achieve.
