Practicum 2

My practicum focuses on Youtube as a social networking site.  Recently, many people have probably heard about this girl Rebecca Black and her new song Friday.  The music video was made by a company who specializes in creating viral videos.  The video has definitely gone viral with almost 59 million views in just over a month.  However, a lot of the attention is extremely negative - although there are 119,000 likes, there are over 1,000,000 dislikes and the majority of the comments are negative.  There is no question that by any reasonable standard, this is one of the worst songs ever made.  The girl sings in monotone autotune and the lyrics are mind-numbingly literal.  But Youtube has made her an overnight sensation and she is definitely famous.  It has also provided a lot of controversy on the issue of cyber bullying and how the comments directed at this girl are so negative.  This brings a lot of questions about Youtube's function as a social networking site.  For better or worse, it has generated a lot of conversation, not only through Youtube comment sections, but also through video responses.  Still, it shows how different Youtube is from other social networking sites, since it focuses primarily on video media and the connections made between people are pretty superficial.