Youtubers and Politicians

Sometimes I wonder how does people in the screen make to catch us and keep attending to the luminous display and making us think. Furthermore, people are used to idolize somebody for their actions and careers. The most flagrant case may be the one of the Argentinian football player Maradon whose achievements reached to the creation of a church in his name.

But let us go a step closer to us, to the word of speakers and displays. What does make us pay attention to people? Their image and their words.

It can be impossible to think about but, can we relate President Barack Obama with PewDiePie? Yes, we can (no pun intended). This is not going to be a completely scientifical article as I kept doing these past weeks, but an opinion based on experience. 

First of all, these are the sources.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hg8ntdSbmCk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l74xXbJmTHM

I didn't typed the name on the urls on purpose so the readers cannot prejudice the content. Once you had seen them, let us ponder about these photograms:

Both mr: Obama and PewDiePie are talking to their respective interviewers. Their gaze goes out of the frame in a middle direction (not up nor down) and they smile while talking. The position of the camera is close and mid-frontal, so there is a space for letting presuppose the interviewer. Evenmore,  both are wearing a blazer with white shirt.

Despite the endless braces pit that separates both (language, country, social position, career, age...), there are elements that join them. But, as we always do, let us look into one step forward:

The movement in their eyes: it is quite common for a person to deviate the look from the interviewer. These are lapses people take to rest their minds, reorganize words and put them in the speech, The gestures with the eyeballs while talking are almost the same! Both look right downwards!(PewDiePie makes a difference but it is lesser) This fact called my attention because mr. Obama has lots of hours of training behind to behave in front of the camera and transmit whatever he wants to transmit but Felix is an amateur, more whether we talk about TV interviews.

Prosody and length of the sentences: This fact is even more impressive taking into account the gap existing between English and Swedish (Felix's native language). I am not making a prosodic nor syntactic analysis but leave it to the hearer's interpretation, and hope to be suprised if they realize.

The elimination of the "capitalism" factor: it can be thought of a stupid fact, but offering an interview with public media instead of the ones that the subjects own has to do with the empathy spectators might feel for them while displayed. Both videos are from 2014 summer and a similar length. Just to add, the interview is spontaneous, so they answer what they know. This is, both won NOTHING for the interview and that leaves us a neutrality to think about them, albeit the disparity of the topics they are discussing.

And these were my realizations of today! I hope you enjoyed them and like them if so!

Thank you for watching!

Sources:

- "The New York Times" Youtube Channel, "EXCLUSIVE OBAMA INTERVIEW: China as a Free Rider | The New York Times", (seen 2014/12/13)

- "SwedenmagicExtra" Youtube Channel, "Interview with Pewdiepie, June 2014 Sweden (HD)", (seen 2014/12/13)