“The video clip ‘Guitar’ was first posted on YouTube in April 2007. It features a man, Peter Nalitch, singing a song with some basic lyrics – in a tastily ‘corrupted’ form of English – while dancing in and around an old Kopeika car (a legendary Soviet analogue of the people’s car: the Lada 12004) and by the riverside in a rural area with strong resemblance to that of Moscow-style dachas (small summer countryside cottages).
The lyrics feature passages, such as: ‘I’ve never been lonely / Cause me is so cool’; ‘I have never been clever / Because need it never / Baby, you have a possibility / Play it with me’ and ‘I put on my pyjamas / And go to Bahamas’. This exuberant construction is crowned by the chorus that includes the following lines: ‘Guitar, guitar, guitar, guitar / Come to my boudoir’ or ‘Jump to my Jaguar’.”
Would you say that the clip above is ‘idiotic’? Whatever your answer, the video is nevertheless cited as an example in a 2013 paper for the journal Convergence, vol. 19 no. 2, 223-235, entitled : ‘New media idiocy’ (available at US$36.00 for non-subscribers). Its author, Dr Olga Goriunova, who is a Senior Lecturer in Digital Culture at the Department of Media Arts, Royal Holloway University of London, explains that :
“Creativity in the individual and collective process of becoming idiot produces phenomena that may be neither aesthetically brilliant nor politically very sound, but constructs forms of performance and craftsmanship that allow the inhabitation of the present, creating modes of living that explore the true through the false. Idiocy problematizes the mechanization and exposure of subjectification; it is light and funny, but also very dark in what it asks and reveals through its behaviour: the trouble of the current human condition.”
A previous draft of the paper may be read in full here, free of charge.
Question: Do you have a favourite example of ‘New media idiocy’? If so, let us (and others) know by commenting with a link below.