Sburke42's Blog

Final Project: Author’s Statement and Analysis/Reflection May 14, 2010

Our South Park/Facebook Mashup

Authors Statement

I think our final project piece turned out very well.  I think it effectively combined digital networked media with mashup aspects while telling a digital story.  It also used as well as criticized emerging digital networked tools.

Facebook has become synonymous with the relationships that we have with other people.  You write on your closest friend’s walls and comment on their pictures.  It also creates pseudo-relationships between people that would not otherwise have them.  I say ‘pseudo’ because these relationships are based solely on the interaction that you have time for in your online social life.  As Danah Boyd says, “Social networks provide valuable insight into people’s practices and interactions, but they do not confer meaning…I would love to find the strangers that I regularly share space with as I traverse Boston. But we cannot assume that these are my friends or acquaintances. Yet, there seems to be a tendency to overlay meaning-laden terms on top of these networks, to assume that high connectivity means friendship.”  This is one aspect that we were trying to show in our video.  Some of the relationships that you make on Facebook are not even real, physical relationships, yet we apply meaning to them as if they are just as important.  Most people would not share their own, personal space with a complete stranger, yet that is exactly what many of us do on Facebook and other online social networking places.  In our video, Stan is stopped on the street by a man whose friend request he denied.  When asked why this was, he replied that he did not know him.  This is the response that you would think most people would have in this situation but that is not always the case on-line.

We also wanted to show the immersion aspect of Facebook and other social networking devices.  I myself have been immersed in the world of Facebook and let it distract me from things occurring in my immediate, physical world.  I have even gotten involved in and spent hours playing stupid Facebook games that don’t even matter (maybe our video made me realize the inanity of these games).  This is one of the points where the virtual and physical worlds meet.  Jane McGonial discusses this when she says, “The increasing convergence and mobility of digital network technologies have given rise to new, massively-scaled modes of social interaction where the physical and virtual worlds meet.”  I hope our video, much like the original South Park episode, can convey the meaninglessness of some parts of this virtual world and put some things in perspective.

I hope that you enjoy our South Park/Facebook mashup and can take away some new ideas about social networking.

Analysis and Reflection

There have been numerous songs made about social networks.  Some of these are meant to make fun of and criticize the importance of social networking like Rhett and Link’s Facebook Song, but some of these are real songs that show how much this aspect of their social life means to them.  I may not be able to understand what they are saying in this song, but it is obviously about Facebook and obviously serious on some level.  It also shows how universal social networking can be.  We wanted to use a song that discussed specific things that can and do occur in the world of Facebook.  The song we used, Facebook by Kle Shay featuring Ryan Andrew and Basil Amer, uses the beat of a popular rap song while talking about aspects of Facebook.  This song is a mix of serious Facebook use and making fun of it.  The song is about a guy asking a girl to get on Facebook so he can talk to her with the main chorus line, “Why don’t you get on Facebook?”  In the South Park episode the we took from, the characters are trying to convince Stan to get a Facbook and become immersed in that world.

There is also a part in our video where Cartman is impersonating Jim Cramer from the Mad Money show.  Where Jim Cramer guides you through Wall Street to help you make money, Cartman guides you through Facebook so that you can have the most Facebook value which is friends.  This is a funny spoof and effectively shows how much importance some people place upon these digital network technologies.  There have been other parodies that have used Mad Money to convey how much importance some people place on things or in an attempt to create fake importance for something, such as in this car dealership commercial.  Also, the technique that Cartman uses to spread his Mad Money-esque show is through a blog in Facebook, another digital media tool that we have used and discussed throughout this semester.

Our video is also similar to my original mashup video that I did for Participatory Cultures.  That is because this South Park mashup also uses a song in the background with different video.  Also, both videos use songs that talk about, describe, and feature a specific thing (vehicles and wheels for my original mashup and Facebook for this one).  We also tried to use one of the same techniques in both videos when we made the video lip sync the song at some parts.  This was also easier than in my first video because lip syncing to cartoons works much better than to real people.  However it is also different from my original mashup because we did leave a couple of the original audio tracks from the South Park episode in the video.  For my first mashup, it was effective to leave all of the rap video’s audio out of the track, but for this project, having a couple of the original video’s audio added to the overall idea that the project was trying to convey.