Here's a few ideas on how to use media to comment
on important social issues.
[THEME MUSIC]
A few weeks ago, the YouTuber Sam Pepper
uploaded a prank video where he pinched the butts of seemingly
unsuspecting women in public.
Many people, myself included, were upset by it.
And then a few days later, he uploaded another video
with the same premise, except now a female host groping men.
Many people were upset by this video, too.
And then a couple days after that,
Sam uploaded a third video where he explained
that the whole thing was a "social experiment,"
that the participants were actors,
and he intended to highlight the differing reactions
to the sexual assault of women versus men.
None of those three videos are on YouTube anymore.
This video that you're watching right now
isn't really about Sam Pepper.
But even in their absence, his videos
do provide great context for the idea of using media
to comment on serious social issues, which
is what this video is about.
However, while we're talking about this,
there are two things that are important to keep
in mind, if you don't already keep these things in your mind.
One, I'm going to talk about how media can be hurtful.
That is not the same thing as encouraging censorship.
Expecting moral standards from media creators
is not the same as preventing them
from creating or distributing media.
Free speech is not some magical incantation
that allows you to say whatever you want free of consequence.
Furthermore, when media is removed from a website
because it violates community guidelines,
that is not censorship.
It is a perfectly common and legal action
supported by the terms of service every user agrees
to when they sign up for basically any website,
including YouTube.
I get it.
You don't like it.
That's fine.
But that doesn't make it censorship.
You are not prevented from distributing that media
in lots of other places.
And two, if you find conversations
about the potentially negative impacts of media
to be silly because there are more threatening things
out there, then why would you let ISIS, cancer,
or the new Pierce Brosnan film top that list?
By this logic, that the bigger threat is always
more important, shouldn't we all agree
to stop worrying about literally everything except for the end
of the universe?
OK, now, on to the matter at hand.
Let's say a media creator identifies
a particularly troublesome social issue, like racism,
sexism, or assault, that they want
to comment on-- ideally with the goal of showing that it is bad.
There are all sorts of ways to do that.
You can report on it, create infographics,
write a novel or performance, make
music or humor-- which we're going to talk more about later.
The avenues are basically endless.
But no matter what you choose as your medium,
simply showing assault or any villainous activity in media
does not automatically generate criticism or commentary.
This is true even if the person who's carrying out the activity
is established as being bad or just kidding.
Criticism isn't generated if the victim is clearly
upset or hurt, or if the setting is
one where we commonly understand bad stuff to take place.
In other words, the portrayal of any heinous act
as we collectively understand it to take place in the world
is not criticism.
It's something called reproduction.
For example, if we see Tony Soprano kill a man
because he is late to pay back a loan,
and we collectively understand that when
you are late to pay back a gangster,
you are killed, and then cut to black,
no criticism has been generated.
We have simply reproduced a situation
that we understand to possibly exist in the world.
Reproduction shows, for example, that violence
is in the world, perpetrated by these people in these places,
with no follow-up.
Criticism, on the other hand, shows heinous acts
as being heinous in an attempt to stigmatize and/or eradicate
them.
This can be done a million ways. "The Daily Show" and "Stephen
Colbert" do it through sarcasm and irony. "The Onion" does it
through satire.
Many movies and TV shows do it by showing
the terrible consequences of engaging in heinous acts.
Reproduction is avoided when commentary
is provided in the same context as the portrayal of the thing
that is being criticized.
"Daily Show" correspondents, for instance,
don't simply pretend to be racist
and then, after stepping out of character or changing costume,
say, "The following is a list of reasons why racism is bad."
"The Wire" doesn't show a bunch of successful, organized
criminals and then, at the end, run
a slate that says, "Even though in certain communities,
it seems like upward class mobility is only
possible by adopting a life of crime, doing so
is no less morally fraught, at best,
and literally destructive, at worst.
Rather, it is during and with the portrayals
of racism and crime that those very things are criticized."
When creators decouple their portrayal of a social ill
from their criticism of it, they reproduce bad stuff first
so that they can comment on it later.
Now, even in service of eventual criticism,
reproduction isn't awesome.
Because it can make bad stuff seem normal,
if only for the amount of time between reproduction
and criticism.
If while showing racism, for instance,
a creator jokes around and in no way confronts its badness
because they're saving that confrontation for later,
or for another video, they very clearly
communicate that racism is funny or normal.
Maybe just for a moment, but as anyone
who makes anything for an audience
understands, every moment with your audience matters.
As a consequence, the experiences
of the people in the audience who
have dealt with racism, sexism, or assault, either directly
or indirectly, are diminished.
These people are effectively told,
the terrible thing that happened to you
is funny or normal to me.
If the criticism comes after the reproduction,
the audience is made to feel a certain way,
and then later, they're told that that feeling was wrong.
This can come across as bad or manipulative storytelling,
or just plain old dishonesty and disrespect.
Either way, it's not a nice thing to do your audience.
Reproduction is also self-perpetuating.
It communicates that if other people were too similarly
reproduce bad stuff, it would be, similarly, funny or normal,
and would maybe even gain them millions of fans.
Now, before you get your angry letter-writing quills
all dipped in righteous ink, let me make a thing clear.
I'm not saying that showing bad stuff
makes people do bad stuff.
It's fun to do bad things.
Rather, I'm saying that the reproduction of social ills
sends the message that they are certain or circumstantially
acceptable, that they are the result
of some inherent or natural quality of culture,
and that there are contexts where they can be viewed
as "right" or "expected."
I believe that sending this message
is potentially damaging.
There is a very, very, very large divide
between saying media causes people to do X
and, when X occurs, we think of it as normal or inevitable
for all kinds of reasons, one of them
being its frequent reproduction in media.
I'm talking about the latter.
Portraying a criticism-free situation
where harassment is shown to be OK or funny
implicitly reinforces the idea that there exists,
out there in the world, situations where
harassment is OK or funny.
Now, at this point, you might be wondering
if I'm saying we should never be allowed to make jokes
about stuff that is bad.
Bad stuff is serious, and serious stuff
needs to be treated like serious.
I'm not.
I'm very solidly of the opinion that we
should be able to tell jokes about all of our worst
and most serious social ills.
I realize that this is a very unpopular opinion
on certain corners of the internet,
but I will stand by the utility of laughter
as a healing method and a tool to show audiences just how
awful the world can really be.
However-- and, man, this is a big however--
it takes incredible skill as a joke-teller of any sort
to do this responsibly.
Because what one must do is not only make an audience laugh,
but make them laugh at something that is framed
as being clearly reprehensible.
Those are two opposite things.
This is so hard to do that Louis CK, one
of the most famous comics and someone who is frequently
so great at it, still gets himself into trouble
when he doesn't properly contextualize jokes
about sensitive subjects.
This tension is so hard to manage that,
depending upon who you ask, at least,
it's exactly what caused Dave Chappelle to leave
show business entirely.
Media-- and comedy, specifically--
can be powerful tools for criticism.
But you know what they say?
With great power comes great risk of being just a huge jerk.
So you know, just try to be considerate, yeah?
It's just that easy.
And apparently also very, very complicated.
Now, in the interest of continuing this conversation
instead of responding to hot sauce comments, which
will be at the end of next week's video,
I'm going to respond to a very small selection of comments
that were left on our first, much shorter video that was
explicitly about Sam Pepper.
Fullphaser and Bacn write comments questioning
whether or not it is appropriate for "Idea Channel"
to be talking about these things.
Bacn even asks whether or not it is "our place."
And I mean, I joke a lot about the internet being my hometown.
It is almost certainly my workplace.
I have lots of friends on the internet, lots
of very important relationships and communities I belong to.
And I think when something bad happens
in your hometown or your workplace,
especially if you have a platform,
it is almost your responsibility to use
it to talk about those things.
We always try to be positive and thoughtful.
But when there are things that are important and potentially
hurtful or damaging to the community,
I feel like we have to talk about them.
And that's true for things like this,
things like net neutrality, and insofar as anybody might think
that it is not "Idea Channel's" place to talk about those
things, I'm-- I'm going to kind of make it our place.
And I'm not going to back down from that.
But we're going to try, like always, to do it responsibly
and thoughtfully.
We do try.
Arian hmn and a bunch of other people
bring up the idea of intention when creating media,
and that if the creator has a certain intention,
they are sort of absolved from their audience misreading
the thing that they made.
And I think that if you are of that mind when
it comes to consuming media, that that is not a bad thing.
But it also does not protect the creator
from the consequences of the feelings of their audience.
That if they intend to tell one story but their audience
receives another story, that's a disconnect in the relationship
between creator and audience.
And when you create things, right?
You are sort of beholden to the responsibilities
of that relationship.
And it's a very, very complicated thing.
It's very fraught.
It is not even.
It can seem very unfair, in certain cases.
And this is why telling stories and making points is very hard.
Jettania makes some prescriptions
about how one could engage in this kind of social experiment
activity and make it a little bit clearer.
And this is, I think, another really big question, is
how could this have been done better?
Me and the "Idea Channel" team talked about this a lot,
actually.
I have some base-level concerns with the "man
on the street" social experiment construct to begin with.
But while talking about it, we kind of-- we
had a very hard time figuring out
how you could have all of these elements of prank,
man on the street, and funny, and sexual assault,
and not make something where the fundamental nature of the video
is compromised.
Which is to say it suddenly, or it very quickly,
becomes not-comedy.
It becomes something that is performance or intervention
or happening, whatever you want to call it.
If you look at people like the Model Pranksters,
the way that they set up their videos,
they make it very clear.
Here, we should just watch a clip from one of their videos.
What would you do if you saw a homeless person getting robbed
right in front of your face?
We took this idea to the streets of New York City.
Dylan's the homeless guy.
These are the robbers.
Let's see what reactions we get.
When the Model Pranksters start a video,
they're very clear about what the parameters are--
who the players are, what their roles are,
and what the context is.
And I think that if you were to try to do that
to a video of a similar stripe about sexual assault,
it would very quickly become not a prank video.
In order to do this kind of thing responsibly,
it's very, very hard to do it, like we
talked about in this video, with humor.
So that being said, the closest thing
we could figure out as being a way
to do this and retain the humor is a bit that "The Daily Show"
did about the way American universities have been
mishandling sexual assault cases,
and the differing norms for being a man at a party
and for being a woman at a party.
And it is not a "man on the street" type of video.
It's not a prank.
But it does very clearly highlight the differing
situations that men and women have
to go through with regard to sexual assault.
And it's very funny.
This is a big one, guys.
Don't pass out on the couch.
Someone might draw, like, a [BLEEP] on your face.
Yes.
Do not pass out on the couch, ladies.
Someone will put their [BLEEP] on your face, at a minimum.
Actually, I-- I meant-- you know what?
Never mind.
So we'll put links to "The Daily Show" bit and "The Model
Pranksters" video in the doobly-doo.
And you know, we talked about it a lot,
and the conclusion might be that doing
a sort of pure social experiment prank video
about sexual assault might not be possible.
You know, as a creator, one of the things
you have to deal with is figuring out
the best format for the message that you're trying to send.
And those two things just might not be compatible.
That being said, I am not a comedy writer.
So if someone has insight that they'd love to share,
I would love to hear it.
But yeah, this is just a very difficult-- it's
a very difficult thing to talk about in this way.
So I know we did the comments a little bit differently,
but I still really want to know what
you guys think about this situation and about the use.
How do you use media responsibly to talk
about important social issues?
So there was a lot to cover.
But any reactions that you have, would love to hear them.
So let us know in the comments.
[THEME MUSIC]