Kim, Y 2015, ‘Globalisation of the privatised self-image: the reaction video and its attention economy on YouTube’, Routledge Handbook of New Media in Asia, edited by Larissa Hjorth & Olivia Khoo, ProQuest Ebook Central, pp.333-342, <https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rmit/detail.action?docID=4185839>.
Because of the interactivity of online projects, audiences are able to share their comments after viewing, which has become an important component of online media. Our idea also develops from this phenomenon, that we are expressing our feelings of the existing album covers, and want viewers of our project to further express their opinions. These responses are forming a positive circulation, helping to analyse the meaning of online media work, and sometimes even go beyond the original thought of creator. Based on this theme, I thought of the reaction video on YouTube, which may be the most popular ‘interpretation’ media work recently, that has already formed its fan culture.
In the article, Kim first mentioned a new rising concept — attention economy, which means attention can be seen as property in the Information Age. Famous YouTubers and bloggers are making profits based on the number of their followers. Creating media products becomes easier, but using quality content to attract fans is a really difficult task.
After reading this chapter, I found two characteristics of reaction video that make this kind of media so appealing. According to Kim, the most popular and also the initial choice of ready-made media works to react are Korean pop music videos and Japanese advertisements. Both of these two Asian cultures are spreading quickly to Western countries in recent years, and cause a lot of culture shock. Kim demonstrated that most of the reactors doing K-pop videos are Westerners, so I guess the global popular trend may be one of their motivation. Also, popular music is not a high art, then reactors or audiences can feel comfortable to act their impression in a comedic way. So as our choice of album cover, the theme is suitable for users to contribute – it is specific and easy to interact with.
In the other side, these K-pop groups already have their fans among Asian, and the existing fans are also the consumers of reaction videos. It means that the interpretation will be more absorbing if the reacted media already has fan groups.
Another important feature of reaction video is that reactors act as consumers and producers of digital media at the same time, and it’s also the point that we want to mainly focus. According to Kim, the main stream of digital era is to actively create things, but reaction video is a ‘passive’ media, that it is built on the ready-made media works. It is interesting that audiences are shifting the attention from K-pop singers or other celebrities in the original video to the reactor — an ordinary person. Fans of a reactor like to watch only his/her video instead of the original media work. It emphasises the great ‘attention power’ of interpretation work, and implies the modular feature that reaction video has become an individual and mature media project. Like our last assignment, the first impression we made may go over the original meaning of the actual album cover, so we also want our audiences to become the ‘reactors’ and express their thought. From this aspect, interpretation video still fit the trend that ordinary people can show their interesting ideas and attract people to watch.
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